Unqualified people teaching in schools

MORE than 1,500 unqualified people are teaching children in Irish schools, the INTO has warned.

Around 800 have no teaching qualification at all while the rest have a post-primary teaching degree or a teaching degree earned in Northern Ireland or Britain.

Speaking on the second day of the INTO’s national conference in Bundoran, Co Donegal, deputy general secretary Catherine Byrne said it was having a very damaging effect on children and teachers.

“Those people are all going into classrooms every single day. If someone is teaching today, next week they might be a florist. It also means that in some rural schools, which can find it harder to attract young teachers, you might have two untrained people and one trained person.”

The issue of unqualified personnel has troubled the INTO for the last 20 years. Joe Lyons, a teacher from Limerick, said he had seen endless versions of the same motion since his first INTO conference in 1983. But he said the Government had to finally take action: “Charles J Haughey gave every child in the country a toothbrush. It’s time to give them a teacher.”

Teachers want a Forum on Teacher Supply to be set up, an increase in the number of primary degree places and some form of conversion course for the unqualified personnel.

Delegates at the conference voted unanimously to refuse to work with unqualified personnel from September 2005. The INTO has also promised to intensify its campaign to bring the pupil/teacher ration down to 20 to one for all children under nine.

Currently, more than 130,000 children are in classes of over 30.

Teachers also voted to demand an increase in the number of psychologists employed to assess children with special needs. In the midwest, only four of 13 places allocated have been filled by the newly established National Educational Psychological Service.

Delegates also raised concerns about the lack of training for resource and special needs teachers and the shortage of speech and language therapy services. “At present, a child will wait approximately a year before being seen by a speech and language therapist. Therapists should be employed by the Department of Education directly and allocated to individual schools or clusters of schools,” said Dublin teacher Miriam Mulkerrin.