Mr. Ger Curtin:

Senator Ruane asked about shared teachers. There is a certain seriousness about this in the sense that it impacts on subject choice. That also ties in with Deputy Catherine Martin's question about parents' concerns. The National Parents Council Post Primary stated:

Clearly the subject choice available to students around the Country is limited if teachers cannot be recruited in certain subject areas and service to students is inevitably negatively affected if serving teachers choose to leave the profession for other forms of employment.

Therefore it has an impact. Let me talk about my subject, physics. I might have ten periods of physics in my school. A neighbouring school may not have a physics teacher and may have a cohort of students who wish to do the subject. That has potential. That was addressed in the Ward report in September 2014; it was issue 5 on the shared employment of teachers between two schools. The report stated:

I therefore recommend that a system be devised whereby teachers are permitted to split their employment between two schools in appropriate cases and that a scheme be formulated to allow for such shared employment to be put in place on a pilot basis.

I agree with Deputy Martin that the teaching profession has been devalued by having teachers on unequal pay in our classrooms. That is impacting on the morale among the profession across the country. Having incentives for certain subjects will create another inequality that we do not need. Why would a teacher of physics get a grant when a teacher of history does not get one because there are more history teachers than physics teachers? It is outrageous and wrong. All teachers should be on equal pay.

I am not sure about a different salary scale for teachers in cities. Where I work it is a travel allowance that should be considered.

I teach in Finglas. There are teachers travelling from Navan, Newbridge, Wicklow, Dundalk and Carlingford to the city. One could give them a city wage but why not give them a fuel wage? It would work out the same. It is absolutely ridiculous.

What is happening with the subject of home economics is the food companies are coming in and giving teachers a full-time job, not a few hours. There is a better salary and greater opportunities. Could we do something there? In the two year PME many teachers have already completed their first year very successfully. They are in their second year and they are taking classes. Why not pay them? They are doing the work. There is nothing wrong with that.

On Deputy Thomas Byrne's comments, it looks as if there is no plan. All we get are occasional announcements that the Department will try something such as cutting the career breaks or giving incentives in certain subject areas. They are not solutions. The question is whether this problem will be solved by next September. I cannot see it being solved. I would like it to be solved. With regard to the notion of teachers going to Dubai, it is bigger than Dubai. There are recruitment fairs in all our third level colleges at present and the education councils of Britain, America, Canada, Europe and the Middle East are at them. They are all offering full-time jobs and full salaries. That is the reality. There is no great push to get teachers to stay. They are the issues.

Deputy Funchion spoke about students being without a teacher. If I were that parent I would go ballistic as well. It is serious because a qualified teacher is required. If somebody's son or daughter is doing the junior certificate or leaving certificate, that person would like to know that he or she is being taught by a fully qualified teacher. As professionals, all of us would be unhappy with that. I would not be happy going in to teach an Irish class for the very good reason that I am not competent or qualified to teach it. I believe parents have to get on board on this because this is very much for parents as well as for teachers. As a profession we do not want unqualified teachers teaching students in our schools. We would have a serious concern about that.