Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Labour Party, I wish to support and welcome this motion. I have read the Minister's reply and I am very disappointed. In his previous post, he was very fond of talking about the disruptive effects, in a positive way, of change. I and others have been drawing this problem of substitute teachers to the attention of the Minister for the past year and a half. I have correspondence here from around Ireland that I can give to him about schools that have specific problems, whether it is in Kilkenny, Dublin or the west, all of which are experiencing the same difficulty. Less well off schools are experiencing more of a difficulty, perhaps because they do not have the network of retired teachers living in their area who may be available to do some substitution. This problem is a nightmare for many working principals who find they have to reallocate resource teachers to cover unexpected absences from the teaching staff.

There is a fundamental issue, and it cuts to the Minister's approach. Can he assure us that he does not have a model for Irish education, and for teachers in particular, which essentially makes large groups of them part of the gig economy because at the back of all of this is the fact that we have a growing young population, and we had an enormous school building programme under the previous Government which now continues? Those schools are full. They are located throughout Dublin and the counties, from Meath down to the south east where there is an enormous increase in the population. We had debates here about the need to build more houses so it follows, as night follows day, that we as a country, and the Government in particular, need to rethink our approach to the way we make provision for an adequate supply of teachers and how, having achieved very high levels of recognition in the various tests run internationally relating to the achievements of Irish pupils, we can continue to build on that.

Entire forests have disappeared to provide reports that allow us to speak about the necessity of STEM subjects, but how do we do STEM in a school where one or more teachers suddenly is missing? In Dublin West, many primary schools have 750 to 1,000 pupils and there are even more students than that in the secondary schools, particularly the newer, very successful ones. I have an endless supply of paper from the Minister telling me what he is not doing, so let us consider teachers' conditions and recruitment. We accept the arguments he has put forward about the additional recruitment of teachers in his amendment to the motion, but that was done by the previous Government in a situation where all recruitment had stopped around 2010 and where reductions in wages for entrants had started around that time.

The Minister has a couple of jobs to do if he is not to develop a gig economy atmosphere in staff rooms. I do not believe he wants that, but I believe he has not thought about it. We need to see a proper restoration and agreement with the teachers' unions about entrants' pay. The Minister has to address the issue of the extraordinarily high fees being charged for the postgraduate qualifications that now seem to be a standard requirement of teaching.

4 o’clock

It should be borne in mind that notwithstanding the Minister's initiative, postgraduate fees of €5,000 a year for two years are beyond the reach of a lot of kids from ordinary backgrounds with low or modest family incomes. A lot of ordinary families work but do not have that kind of fee money to spend. While the Minister's initiative to address that is welcome, it is not enough. He must recognise and acknowledge that.

The Minister must reach an agreement with the teachers' unions and he must deliver on his statement that he would open through Springboard and other avenues possibilities for people interested in taking up teaching a little later in life, perhaps in their 30s. The Minister must make it much more accessible to them. Make no mistake about it, if we want to continue to attract world-class companies to Ireland, it will depend on our ability to attract well-trained teachers who are remunerated at a rate above the living wage in order that they can buy homes and establish families or pay the exorbitant rents the Government has overseen. We must return to the teaching profession respect and admiration for its professionalism and dedication to students. In my constituency, approximately 30% of students come from backgrounds which are not exclusively ethnic Irish. In every single school, however, the unwritten and unspoken motto has been that every child is welcome no matter what his or her background. That is a core achievement of this generation of teachers, in particular those who have been teaching in places like Dublin West for 20 years and they do not get enough recognition for it. There are many young people who are interested in taking up teaching, but there are barriers and inhibitors to them doing so. Chief among them is the message the Minister has sent. Relatively speaking, the sun is shining on the Irish economy and now is the time to go out and fix the roof to provide secure employment for the current and next generation of teachers to allow them to take pride in their profession.

The Minister has to get to grips with this. I have raised this with him as recently as just before Christmas but I have got the same answer on many occasions. I will read to him just one of the notes a principal teacher has sent me. In one of the local schools there was a lack of a substitute teacher in the case of a bereavement with the result that a resource teacher had to take a junior infants class for the week with a knock-on effect on resource hours. Teaching is very planned nowadays and people work at length on their educational programmes for lesson periods. Resource support is part of the week and the life of children who need it. The Minister is undermining the core efficiency, attractiveness and success of our primary school education system. I fully support the Minister on his desire to expand STEM and modern languages but it is not possible to do it when no substitution is available and we cannot attract really good new entrants to the profession unless the Government addresses the core issue of entrant salaries.

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