Mr. John Boyle:

I thank Deputy Wynne. I will begin with substitution teacher supply for primary in the South and I will also try to cover post-primary and the North. For the South, our analysis from Department statistics given to us for August to December last year would be that on any given day, we are down 1,600 teachers for primary. That manifests in many different ways. It basically means there are 1,600 groups of children every day that do not have a teacher. For example, it could be a mainstream class where a substitute could not be found. That would happen primarily in the rent pressure areas and would not tend to happen outside rent pressure areas because many teachers are voting with their feet. They cannot afford to live in a rent pressure area so they are staying locally to try to get work, maybe on the western seaboard or in the midlands, and they are securing work. In primary, there is no problem getting work and there is no problem getting full-time hours. For most of the jobs that have come into the primary sector in recent years, we have managed to find creative ways of clustering bits of jobs together, for example, the one weekly principal’s release day can perhaps be clustered with special education hours or with some of the other hours that teachers get for supporting children who are fleeing wars and natural disasters. That creates a full-time post and people are very attracted to those. However, we are still down about 1,600 on a daily basis, as I said, and that is 1,600 groups of children not having their right to an education on that day.

The situation in post-primary is very different. In post-primary, one of the big impediments is that it is difficult to get a permanent job and it is difficult to get full hours because of the way the system has developed over the years. Many post-primary teachers when they start out on their career path are only working part-time hours, so if the starting salary for a post-primary teacher is €42,000, there are not that many of them who can achieve that salary because they are being paid on a pro ratabasis.

We had a campaign on teacher supply over recent months and the Government agreed to 610 extra students being brought into the higher education institutions. Of course, it is not 610 in the first year; it is about 310 in the first year and 300 in the second year. Some of those students will not graduate until four years afterwards because they are not all on the postgraduate two-year course and many of them are on the four-year course, so some of them will not actually be available until 2028. That big gap of 1,600 has to be filled in different ways. Our key demand of the Government is to make the profession more attractive on the island, North and South.

One of the ways of making the profession more attractive is to try to encourage teachers who are currently not available to work. There is a huge disparity between the number of registered teachers and the number who are actually working. When we explore that further, we find that many of the people who are not available to work are either retired or are abroad. Some of them are also working in other areas of education, which is very necessary too, for example, developing new curricula and so on, but the majority are either retired or abroad, and they keep up their registration but they are not available to work here. For retired colleagues, we have been asking the Department to look at the amount it is paying them to incentivise them to come back into the schools, and not to abate their pension if they make themselves available, put on the green jersey and come back into school after retirement. For those who are abroad, the attractiveness of the profession goes back to all of the cuts that happened between 2009 and 2013. It is very difficult to get a promotional post. Assistant principals are like hens’ teeth in the bigger schools in the urban areas, whereas back in the day, when I was a principal, I had a good middle management team in the school and this was a career path for teachers. There was also the removal of all of the allowances that teachers used to get.

They have been removed since 2012 for so-called new beneficiaries. The impact of that is that if one tries to progress one's career, by, for example, doing specialist courses for special education, and one achieves a diploma, there used be an allowance coming with the diploma provided that one committed to stay in special education for four years. One could not keep the diploma allowance for life. If one stayed for four years, one kept it. Now, if one did a diploma, one gets no allowance and there is no incentive for people to even work in special education. In our efforts in the next public service agreement, we will be trying to get Government to row back on those cuts that happened ten or 12 years ago.

In the North, Queen's University Belfast did not fill all its places for teacher education courses this year. Obviously, that is a concern as well, but maybe not a big surprise when one thinks about it. If young school leavers have choices as to what work they will pursue and if one will only start on £24,000 as a teacher, who can live on that? Who can live anywhere in Northern Ireland on £24,000, particularly at the time of a crisis in the cost of living that we have had the past couple of years? It is very worrying for us that the number of teachers being trained in the North will drop as a result of the courses not being filled and this is why we are calling for a forum to be established in Roinn an Taoisigh to look at education on the island in all its ways, not only the salaries but also the funding streams for schools.