Irish Teacher: The Irish public fail to respect teachers — happy home-schooling!

Jennifer Horgan, Diary of an Irish Schoolteacher

So, schools are going to share teachers to make up for the staffing crisis.

I can picture them now: The maths and languages teachers huddled together in my place on the first day back after Easter, flicking through catalogues of roller skates, scooters, and skateboards, trying to figure out how to get between schools as quickly as possible. We don’t have a school building, or accompanying car spaces, so driving won’t be an option for many. A Star Trek Transporter platform would be ideal.

Upstairs, school management will be grappling with the department’s latest and most desperate measure. It already takes them months to figure out teacher timetables against ever-changing circulars and budgets. Incorporating another school’s timetable is going to hurt. What if we have hour-long classes and they have 40-minute classes?

What about our school ethos? We put relationships at the centre of everything we do. Will the department support us in getting to know a whole new community of teachers, students, special needs assistants and parents? Will we be given time to learn the needs of entirely new students?

The funny thing is: I’d love if schools worked together more, sharing resources and everything else. But that is not how schools work right now. 

I’m trying to weigh up if this idea is as bad an idea as suggesting retired teachers re-enter the classroom, as if they didn’t retire for a reason. Or the exceptional proposal by Norma Foley that people end their career breaks while she’s on one. Or suggesting people like me go from part time to full time in order to help out. As if my vocation should trump my duties to my family and my own aspirations as a person.

I’m not entirely sure what the solution is, but I do know it will involve making teaching more attractive to already-qualified teachers and to young people. There are so many teachers in Ireland on unsustainable contracts. I worked with an amazing English teacher when I first returned from abroad; he was heading into his fourth maternity leave.

People forget two things. Firstly, that society can’t function without teachers, whether you like them or not. Secondly, teachers generally have the capacity to earn far more money doing something else.

To become a teacher you have to be bright, earning at least a 2.1 degree. You also need to have considerable financial backing, enough to get you through five years at university. Most teachers, according to an ERSI and Teaching Council survey in 2016, earn far more CAO points than they need to get into teaching. According to the same study, they also have a middle-class family background that allows them to stay in the game for as long as they do. They grow up in the competitive CAO atmosphere we’ve created, alongside people who earn more money than they ever will. An old school classmate once told my husband he always thought my husband would have “done more” with his life. He’s a primary school teacher.

What’s happening now is not complicated. These middle-class, bright, young people are choosing something else because the profession isn’t adequately respected. The Irish public, instead of listening to teachers, calls them lazy. And our Government continues to underfund the system and get away with it. And the wheels are buckling and one by one, young would-be teachers are getting off, checking out, leaving the country or opting for a profession that will earn them more money, more security, and most importantly, more respect.

The era of the vocation is gone. We’ve killed vocations by failing to respect the people involved.

What everyone in Ireland should demand is an actual commitment to education. We need to diversify the profession by making the training possible for people without the white middle-class profile. We also need real investment in school buildings, the teaching profession, and specialist training for special educational needs staff. Posts are unfilled in schools because they’re rubbish posts nobody can afford to take after years of unpaid training. This is especially true for young people in cities, where what is reasonable pay by international standards is not enough to live on.

This sharing-teachers pilot will probably fail but it will succeed in acting as a distraction to buy the Government time while they sell teachers and Irish children further down the river. Nothing will change because instead of calling it out as bogus, the Irish public will spend their time complaining about teachers. Until this changes young teachers will continue to head to the sun or into a different profession.

Happy home-schooling everyone!