Budget 2017: Threat to extra teaching posts

Extra teaching posts announced in Budget 2017 could be withheld from hundreds of second-level schools if the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) remains involved in industrial disputes.

They include 550 new jobs to allow for teachers taking part in training linked to junior cycle reforms. A further 150 primary and second-level teachers will be needed as a reformed middle-management structure is introduced next autumn.

They are among 2,400 extra teachers promised by the end of 2017 in Education Minister Richard Bruton’s budget of €9.5bn, a €458m or 5.1% increase on what was allocated to the Department of Education a year ago.

But ASTI’s 18,000 members have not signed up to adopting the junior cycle reforms and are outside the Lansdowne Road Agreement under which Mr Bruton’s officials recently agreed a new school leadership system with the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) and Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) to begin restoring some of the hundreds of posts of responsibility lost in schools.

“We are making provision on the assumption that the ASTI would be fully participating, both in the rollout of junior cycle and in those posts, I think that has to be our working assumption. All of those [posts] are conditional on people co-operating, obviously,” Mr Bruton said.

The minister urged the ASTI to get involved in discussions and enjoy the benefits gained by the other unions on early career pay and job security, and more flexible use of extra working hours.

An ASTI spokesperson said budgeting and the allocation of resources are matters for the minister.

“The ASTI is committed to resolving all outstanding issues. We await the outcome of our ballots later this week,” she said.

The union criticised the absence of a full restoration of equal pay for recently-qualified teachers, one of the demands on which its members have been asked to mandate industrial action up to strike. A second ballot asks them to withdraw from supervision and substitution duties, work they say is no longer obliged to be done since a previous pay agreement lapsed this summer.

Despite the extra posts for a reformed middle management system, the INTO and TUI also pointed to the continuing pay inequality for those first appointed after 2011. Although members of both unions are to see some bridging of that gap, they continue to pressure officials for full pay parity.

The minister’s announcement of ringfenced provision of guidance counselling for second-level schools next September reverses his previous position that principals be allowed the freedom on how to cover this service.

But TUI president Joanne Irwin said even the addition of 100 new posts, to facilitate the change, would leave schools with less guidance provision than before the cut introduced in 2012.

INTO general secretary Sheila Nunan said the Government’s failure to reduce class sizes in its first budget meant a Programme for Government commitment was being left behind, and the lack of increase in rates of day-to-day funding for schools meant they would continue to rely on fundraising and asking parents for voluntary contributions.

Mr Bruton said it was the first of at least three budgets to be introduced and he intended honouring all Programme for Government commitments, but he had to look at priorities that could be met with money available for 2017.