Mr. John Irwin:

There are two areas that must be looked at. I am delighted to hear about the additional concurrent courses addressing specific subject areas that have been announced in DCU. They will provide a medium-term solution. Obviously, it will take four years for people to be qualified and the course will begin in 2019.

The immediate issue we have is in two phases. The first is dealing with regular part-time contracts for an entire year. When we look for people to fill these positions, if we look at the overseas market, people chose to leave here for economic reasons at the end of completing a two year professional master of education, which is quite a costly process for teachers, and while there are people who want to come back we do not have the structures in place to bring them back easily and facilitate them coming back into the process. We know commercial companies are quick enough to be able to get them out, but we have to apply the same type of rationale and create return pathways, such as there are in some of the UK regions, to try to facilitate people coming back into the Irish system. An element of this is that they have to be able to access decent contracts, preferably 22-hour contracts for qualified teachers on full-time contracts. There are full-time vacancies that are very difficult to meet. We can look at the returning market.

We also need to look within Ireland, where there are people who may have gone into business and have experience of the private sector who would like to consider returning to or getting involved in education and bringing the experience they have into the classroom, which would also be valuable, but this quite difficult to do. It is hard to imagine giving up a salaried position for two years to do a professional master in education in order to return to the classroom. We do not make it easy for people, if they are not initial graduates, to come back into the teaching profession and bring their skills with them. We also have to look at the short-term vacancies that exist in schools. The survey we carried out highlights a particular problem, which is for the vast majority of short-term placements a qualified teacher will not be found. Recently, we have had oral exams going on in schools, which were facilitated by teachers leaving their own schools to conduct the examinations, but we cannot get qualified teachers to replace them in the classroom. To do this as a short-term measure, we have to consider, as Fr. Connell has mentioned, the five-day rule for people who have language skills. We also have to consider whether we can access people who have retired to come back in, and whether we access, which we cannot do at present, people who are job sharing in schools.

Those on job-share in schools may be able for that period of time to take on additional hours but they are prohibited under terms and conditions from doing so. We can also look at teachers on a career break - that was a positive initiative - to try to see if they can come back in. Therefore, we have a number of different issues that we need to examine and we have a number of different ways that we can address it.

There are possibilities overseas. There are possibilities for people who are currently qualified to come back in. There are possibilities of some who are retired coming in for short-term vacancies. There are possibilities of those who are currently in schools, for example, on career break, who are prevented from doing additional substitution work. It would help to alleviate the immediate problem. The medium to long-term will depend on the concurrent courses.

I am delighted to hear that there is not a drop in applications for education courses. That is not what is being indicated. If one looks at the surveys that are coming back from schools, there does not seem to be an oversupply in certain areas. The reality is that certain areas are not indicating any problems filling posts while others are. Trying to increase the number of science and mathematics graduates coming into the profession is really important.

On terms and conditions, pay is an issue. It is the elephant in the room.