Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Section 30 of the Teaching Council Act 2001 will be commenced later this year and will probably apply with full effect in the new year. A condition of that is that every teacher who gets paid from the public purse - some 76,000 and virtually all the teachers in the country - will have to be registered with the Teaching Council. To maintain their registration each year, they will have to do continual professional development, as is the case for doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Incentivising people to do further courses, which is a legacy going back as much as 50 years, has been replaced by an obligation on teachers, as on all professionals, to keep their professional competences up to date. It should not require the kind of incentivisation that has existed and is a legacy from the past that we do not need.

In a year and a half or less, I hope there will be a new public sector agreement on pay and conditions. The issues to which Deputies referred will be part of that. We could not touch the existing agreement without provoking a confrontation. We explored that and we got very clear messages. It took a long time. The most reluctant signatories to the Croke Park agreement were the ASTI, TUI and IFUT. One teaching union had to vote twice to get agreement to it. Informed with that information, we had to make the choices we did.

I feel neither complacent not smug about those choices. I am fully aware of their potential impact, over time, on the teaching profession. I am not a professional educationalist, but all the evidence from different education systems are ad idem on the assertion that the key factor in any education system, primary and post-primary, is the quality of the teacher. Good teachers produce good outcomes, irrespective of many of the other things. I am conscious of the potential impact down the road, when I hope we will have a different kind of agreement that will enable us to do some of the things to which the Deputies refer.

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