Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senators for raising this. There is a good deal of misunderstanding in this area. These posts have always been on secondment. They were never designed to be permanent management posts and they were always renewed on a yearly basis. They have never been permanent positions and they are not management positions. The approach the Department has always taken is that it wants those who direct these centres to have recent education experience and to ensure they are drawn from and refreshed from the pool of people teaching in the classroom because the policy is that those who have that active and recent learning experience are best placed to develop the programmes that serve teachers.It has also been the policy that those teachers who have been in an education centre on a temporary secondment can go back to their school and enrich the environment. As the Senators are aware, the most important thing in any school is the quality of leadership and teaching. Those teachers who have had experience in these centres and have been exposed to the learning there can enrich the position of their own schools. That is important background to this. It was never intended that these would be permanent management positions. They have been consciously designed as drawing from active teachers for a period. The policy up to 2010 had allowed a year-on-year roll-on and it was decided at that point not just to reduce the number but to have five-year terms. I think that policy is correct. It allows that rotation, the return to the classroom and the refreshing of the people who are in it.

The Senator suggests there has been no consultation on this but that is not the case. This was introduced in 2010, seven years ago. People in those posts were allowed to get a new contract. At the end of that period, because people were concerned, there was a negotiation and agreement was reached that there would be a three-year phase where people would rotate out, and that would give time for succession planning. This was not taken up by many of those individuals and, as the Senators know, there has been a suggestion that the Department did not have an entitlement to execute the policy, which was that these are secondments, which are temporary in nature. Therefore, we have had to introduce a statutory instrument to ensure we do have that authority and that there is no doubt about the authority.