Schools under ‘enormous strain’ over unfilled posts

8 comments

1. Dublin are under strain. Can’t get a job in the rest of the country, not to mention trying to get a proper contract that offers job stability. Not to mention the difficulty in achieving degrees in some subjects, the teacher supply chain is heavily skewed towards humanities.

2. A lot of them would be short term positions covering for stuff like maternity. There should be no surprise that graduates aren’t interested in doing an expensive 2 year postgrad to qualify as a teacher just to spend the next few years moving around schools on a succession of part time, short term contracts.

   If you knew you’d graduate straight to a full time permanent position I’m sure there’d be no shortage.

3. A secondary school teacher starts at 42k a year.

   Which there is nothing wrong with.

   But the issue is schools not offering full hours or permanent contracts.

4. As somebody who isn’t a teacher.

   What is the problem here? Just lack of qualified teachers in Ireland? Or just that they don’t want to work for the money offered?

5. Whole profession needs a rethink. I did the BME course in Galway a few years ago – 10 of us graduated, of which only 1 still teaches in Ireland. Most of us now work in the private sector and earn more than we would be if we were teaching, and a couple of the others teach either down under or in Dubai.

6. My solution to this and the lack of doctors, nurses and gardai is for the state to offer zero interest mortgages to people working for them in these roles (and potentially others). It wouldn’t really cost the state much and it’d allow people in those professions to do those jobs in areas with high property prices.

7. Lack of suitable housing could also be a reason why they can’t find staff.

8. I’ve made this comment before – but it’s sadly still relevant.

   I’m a teacher, but on secondment for the last few years so I’m not in the classroom daily and what I’ve seen is now a few years old.

   The damage being done by the failure to deal with this issue is hugely damaging. We are losing the best young teachers, not the worst. The group who leave tend to include the most ambitious and dedicated, who have the most options, and aren’t afraid of the private sector. That is especially true of those in STEM disciplines where the job market is strong.

   Those who stay therefore tend to include to a greater degree (and obviously not exclusively) those who are motivated by, “June, July, and August” – teachers not for the job but for the amount of time they *don’t* have to do the job and can focus on the farm / the GAA / their music / politics.

   Schools will obviously always contain both, but it is terrible for the future to lose one systematically and not the other. [“The quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers”](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/how-the-worlds-best-performing-school-systems-come-out-on-top)

   Not only that, but from what I saw current job conditions for young teachers are turning many of them into bad and lazy teachers. I see teachers who spend 5/6 years hanging around a school on low hours in the hope they will get a full time contract when someone dies. In those 5/6 years of working 11 hours a week and subbing they develop bad habits and get out of shape for their normal work rate. Subbing is fundamentally different from teaching and doing it for a long time when you’ve little teaching experience damages your classroom management skills.

   When you have Irish teachers in STEM subjects still going over to the UK, where pay is lower and conditions worse, then that’s a sign that the system here has failed terribly.

   One element of it that I never see talked about is how two factors came into play to create a perfect storm of low hours and insecure contracts.

   Teaching has always been dominated by women. It has become more gender balanced, but the role of women has changed also in that time. Used to be, 40 years ago, reasonably common for a woman to work part time in a job like teaching while the husband had the real job. Those women are now retiring, and leaving parts of jobs behind them for a younger generation who can’t live on part of a job to take-up.

   Meanwhile the requirements for teachers have increased over the last decade. Schools want in-field teachers, those with qualifications in their subjects that match the requirements set by the teaching council. It used to be the case that a teacher would be slotted in somewhere to make up hours for them, that happens less and less now.

   “Sharing jobs” between schools in high demand subjects might have been enough 10 years ago to bridge the gap. I fear that at this stage it is too little too late.