Teachers ‘falling behind on pay ladder’
The union’s president, Paddy Healy, said a forthcoming OECD study would show that the status of Irish teachers had fallen from second to seventeenth place among teachers in 20 developed countries.
The OECD Report on Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers will also highlight how the status index for teaching has dropped by almost 50% over the past decade.
“There is a concern about the potential of this development to damage the intake to the teaching profession over time,” said Mr Healy. He said the ratio of teachers’ salaries to average GDP had also fallen from 2.4 to 1.2 between 1994 and 2002.
In his presidential address to the TUI annual conference in Dublin yesterday, Mr Healy said dangerous signals were emerging about the difficulty of attracting new members.
Mr Healy claimed there were already problems with recruiting men into teaching, while there were also difficulties in matching subjects taught by teachers with their actual qualifications.
On the specific issue of benchmarking, the TUI president expressed some reservations about it as a method for making accurate pay comparisons.
“The main competitors with teaching for high quality entrants are self-employed professions with which comparison is not allowed under benchmarking,” said Mr Healy.
However, during a debate questioning the merits of benchmarking, he told delegates that any attempt to opt out of the process would be “very unwise”.
Mr Healy also called on Education Minister Mary Hanafin, who is due to address the conference today, to avail of a historic opportunity to transform Irish education.
“If underfunding and disadvantage is not tackled when the Exchequer is awash with funds and national wealth is at unprecedented levels, will it ever be tackled?” he asked.
“We expect a very large increase in general education spending in the next Budget to make up for past neglect,” added Mr Healy.
He also expressed concern about the continuing growth of private colleges which are in competition with publicly funded Institutes of Technology.
He described the emergence of such private centres which were not subject to the same level of inspection as “an insult to the education system”.
“Clearly the Government intends to market and partially privatise a large section of our future education system,” he added.
