Parties play the numbers game on teaching posts

WITH just weeks to go to the election, political parties are trying to outbid each other on the number of teachers they will appoint to solve overcrowding in primary school classes.

On Tuesday, Education Minister Mary Hanafin said, if elected, Fianna Fáil would provide 4,000 teachers and reduce average class sizes to 24 students for every teacher within three years.

She was quickly accused by Fine Gael of rehashing a promise already made in the last election but not honoured. Labour accused her of a “totally unrealisable commitment”.

However, Labour’s education spokeswoman yesterday entered the bidding war by claiming her party believed 5,000 extra teachers were required.

“We are committed to bringing Irish primary school classes down to the EU norm of 20-to-one in the lifetime of the next Government,” she said.

“We are also committed to reducing the maximum class size to 25-to-one but it may not be achievable in the lifetime of one government in areas of rapid development.”

Meanwhile, at yesterday’s INTO conference, the union’s equality committee claimed homosexual, transgender and bisexual teachers are being forced to mask their sexual orientation due to fear of repercussions.

“Staff rooms should be a place for everyone and their sexual orientation should not be a bar to them either in promotion or in allocation of classes. The person should be treated as a teacher,” said principal Kieran Griffin.

“There is a section of the (Equality) Act which allows schools to discriminate if the ethos of the school is in question. It means that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual teachers are in fear of that being invoked and therefore they feel that they cannot come out.”

He said schools should be leading society in the way they deal with sexual orientation, yet sexual orientation is not included in schools’ Relationships and Sexuality Education.

It was also claimed that teachers are facing bullying on a daily basis, not just from their peers but from parents.

“There need to be very clear procedures in schools, like hospitals. There are people who have the right to come into school because they are parents, but they do not have the right to abuse teachers,” said school principal, Nora Hamill.

Delegates voted in favour of a call for better training for members in dealing with bullying both by their colleagues and parents and also in favour of better inclusion for those of a different sexual orientation.

However, they stopped short of accepting the INTO Equality Committee’s survey on workplace bullying.

That survey, the results of which were unveiled in January, found that 44% of the INTO’s have been bullied or harassed in the classroom. However, delegates said the findings of the survey were unsound.

The survey did not specify what constituted bullying and who was actually doing the bullying, they said.

It gave an impression that the high percentage of teachers were bullied solely by their colleagues and that simply was not true, thedelegates said.