Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The starting salary for a teacher in Ireland is now over €41,000 and is significantly higher than the equivalent figure in Northern Ireland or Britain, for example. An extra 3,700 newly qualified teachers have registered with the Teaching Council this year and there are now more than 120,000 teachers registered to work in Ireland.

Budget 2024 contains a range of targeted teacher supply measures. These include a professional masters of education incentive scheme, which will be introduced for teachers graduating in 2024. Subject to some conditions, there will be an incentive payment of €2,000, which will be paid to eligible primary and secondary teachers. There will also be an expansion in upskilling programmes for subjects where it has been difficult to recruit teachers, like Irish, French, politics and society, and computer science.

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