Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Three and a half years ago I was chairperson of a primary school in Greystones, County Wicklow. Even then, we were finding it difficult to hire teachers. Even though it was a growing and good new school that was being built, it was so difficult. The reasons were accommodation and rental issues. If we fast-forward to today, we are at a crisis point with this issue.

This is not something that has happened recently; it has been building for many years. My constituency of Wicklow is being particularly impacted as one of the worst affected by this crisis. The Irish Primary Principals Network, in its recent survey, identified that 100% of schools in County Wicklow have had difficulties in hiring substitute teachers. Some 50% of schools in the county do not have their full allocation of teachers. Incredibly, some 96% of the schools have had to resort to redeploying their special education teachers, which is not something any principal would do lightly. I have spoken to people in these schools in recent weeks because I could see that this issue is building and I knew that we were having this debate in the Dáil today. I was surprised at the level of interaction I had from the schools within my constituency. I had a huge number of responses to it and they were all saying the same thing. It painted a stark picture of the conditions that principals, teachers and students are facing.

Principals tell me that every morning when they go into school, they are sick with worry about what phone call will come in and who will ring in sick. We have teachers who, even though they are sick, are going into school to teach because they do not want to let their classrooms, students or colleagues down. If we have learned anything in recent years, it is that when we are sick we need to stay at home. This is putting enormous pressure on our schools. One of the schools in Wicklow told me they were down one third of their teaching staff on a number of occasions in recent months. No principal can manage that situation.

It is not just the principals and teachers who are being impacted by this; it is also having a severe impact on children. For many children their schools are turning from an education facility into a supervision facility if their teachers are not available, particularly for those children who have additional needs, and those children are being left behind again. They were left behind during Covid and they are still trying to make up that time and here, yet again, the Department of Education is leaving them behind because this is not the fault of principals. I know the Minister of State will say, as the Taoiseach said to me recently in the Dáil, that this should never happen and that no special education teacher should be redeployed but the reality is that it is happening and that principals are having to make that decision. I would be interested to hear from the Minister of State what she says to principals if it is a case of redeploying a special education teacher or sending 30 children home. What do they do? The Department is putting them in an impossible situation due to its lack of planning on this issue. It is disgraceful that the supports that special education teachers provide are seen as discretionary by this Government because it knows they are the solution to this crisis that principals are having to deploy.

In preparation for this debate I had a look at the Department's website, where it talks about its values.

One is that the Department values its "staff and all those who work in schools and in other education settings." It claims to value its students and places "the student at the centre of education strategy and policy development." It is clear that those values are not being met.

The motion that we in the Social Democrats are bringing forward is a practical one based on finding solutions for this issue. We are not seeking to take political swipes. We want to work with the Government because we know it is a difficult situation. I hope the recommendations that have been made in this motion will be taken on board and that the Government will take them seriously to find solutions to the problems that have been identified. Speaking on behalf of the Social Democrats, if the Government were to take those solutions on board, we would support the Minister of State in that and work with her constructively to see them implemented. There are no winners in all this; just children losing out on time in the classroom with the resources they need and staff left spinning trying to keep everything going as best they can. We can all agree that cannot be anyone's idea of good enough.

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