Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister’s initiative, which deserves support. I spent 11 years as a primary school teacher in north inner city Dublin, three of which were as a primary school principal. From going around schools speaking to principals and teachers, as the Minister does, I have noted many of them will not speak openly about the day-to-day traumas they witness because they do not want to give the school a bad name or impinge on its reputation. This is because the nature of our school system means they are all in competition with each other. It is my experience and that of people I have worked with, that schools cannot cope with children they are trying to help. It is wrong to assume that any school can adequately deal with the needs of a child. If one takes two four year olds in primary school, one knows that in nine years' time, one will have a better chance of success than the other. One child will be presented as clean, rested, fed and interested, while the other will not. If we are going to talk about the well-being of students, we have to have a wider approach in dealing with parents. It is a well-known fact that the average three-year old from a poor family has one third the oral language capacity of a three-year old from a rich family. There is only so much teachers can do because they do not live in schools.

The reality is that children will have a different perspective on life once they go outside the school gates. They know and are well-trained and well-drilled to give the right answers at the right time to the education professional in front of them. Once outside the school gate, however, or when dealing with their families in their home environment, the reality is sometimes different.There needs to be a wider discussion of all the actors who deal with families and young people who are in difficulty and dealing with trauma, and to intervene at a much earlier stage. I also agree with the Minister when he says that teachers cannot do everything. They are asked to solve every single social ill in society. If there is an issue with sex education, it has to be the teachers who will teach about it. Driving was mentioned. With issues around mental health, smoking, drugs or teenage sex it is the teachers in schools who are told that they are ones who must deliver the message. There is, however, a wider societal involvement here, as the Minister will appreciate.

Many schools cannot cope. They are dealing with situations where the children literally cannot cope with the situations they are in because of their background or because of something that has happened to them. What does a teacher in his or her 20s do when he or she has to deal with a child whose father has just been shot dead by the Garda? How can they deal with that situation? Consider a child who has a family member who has been killed in a gangland situation, or the child who has had a suicide in the family. It is very difficult to build a robust defence mechanism within that child in the classroom if one is not communicating with the parents, the wider community and wider society. There is no quick fix for this issue.

I shall now turn to the issues of drugs and alcohol. In our schools we are failing to deliver a coherent message that might actually resonate with young people. This falls into the idea of well-being because it is what young people will turn to when trying to find some relief from the pain they feel. When one feels pain, one reaches for something. What will these children reach for? They might reach for alcohol or drugs. These young people say to me that they would believe what they hear in schools if it was not such a damned lie. They look around them, they look at their parents and their grandparents who all might have overdosed on drugs and alcohol - alcohol is a drug - and they see a society that is completely addicted to alcohol. However, they are the ones who are told to "just say "No"" and told of zero tolerance, etc. They do not believe this message. They certainly do not believe it when it comes to drugs either. We are going to have to have a much more honest connection with young people when it comes to our messaging around drug and alcohol use. Whatever message we have at the moment is not hitting home. There is a much more attractive message outside the school gates and a different message is potentially being given in the home. I am not sure if all those messages are connecting.

With regard to the class size issue it is a fair point to make that we can deliver all the goodwill message we want, and teachers can have as much of a personal relationship with students under their care as they possibly can but if there are too many student, as a professional, the teacher or principal cannot cope. The Government, of which the Minister is a member, had an opportunity to reduce class sizes last year but it did not bother. Next week the Government will have an opportunity to change the situation, and I hope that it does, because schools cannot cope.

My second point has already been alluded to and relates to how this issue might manifest itself in schools and how teachers feel valued within the system. Teachers are told they are valued, teachers are told they have to take on an expanded curriculum and they are told they must deliver the message to tackle social ills. However, within his own rhetoric the Minister cannot commit to the suggestion or ideal of equal pay for equal work. This is leading to a situation within staffrooms that is hurting. It leads to division and a lack of morale.

I know from my own professional background that the fundamental responsibility of a school principal is to allow a teacher to teach. Fundamentally, the most important unit of the school is the teacher's relationship with his or her class. It is not the principal, not anybody else or any other actor who comes in and out of the class during the pupils' day. The fundamental purpose is to maximise the relationship between a teacher and his or her students. If teachers are told by the State that they are not worthy of having a pay level equal to the people they sit beside in the staffroom, it impacts on their self-esteem as professionals. I ask the Minister, again, to revisit his view on that.

I shall recap on what I have said for the Minister because I feel it is important. I welcome the initiative. Well-being is something that starts way before the age of second level school. It is not just a school responsibility. It is a wider community responsibility and it is absolutely a fundamental parental role that needs to be addressed. We must talk about drugs and alcohol in a different way. Whatever message we are giving in school is not working. We must look at the issue of class size with regard to the effectiveness in delivering these messages. We also must look at the parity of esteem in classrooms and in staffrooms.

My last point is from an article by Neil Gaiman in The Guardian that I read some years ago, which stuck with me. It was a piece about a private prison operator in the United States of America and how they assess the cells and prison space they would need for the capacity issues that would be required in 15 years' time. They determined that the best way of finding out how many spaces they would need in prisons in 15 years' time was to look at the literacy rates of ten year olds. There is an absolute correlation between illiteracy rates, a person's sense of well-being and sense of power, the opportunities a person has and a person's ability to succeed in this system we have created for young people. All of these things are intertwined.

I believe that the Minister comes to this issue with the best of intentions. I believe that schools will openly welcome this initiative, as we always will, because schools always want what is best for their students. There are fundamental, underlying issues that we have in our system based on competition, the patronage model and the issues children have before they come anywhere near a school building. We cannot truncate all these issues into a single weekly class. I wish this initiative the best of luck, but I do it with the wish that the Minister would address the concerns I have raised today.