Union calls for regulatory action over teacher bullying
The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) said there were increasing numbers of cases of websites such as bebo and MSN enabling young people to bully others.
It also claimed that bullying had spread to teaching staff through ratemyteacher websites. The union said there was also bullying of teachers and pupils through intimidating messages.
However, it was mainly on the internet where the union felt the problem was worst. It called on the governments to take regulatory action which would combat the cyber-bullying.
“Bebo and ratemyteacher are at the centre of the problem,” the union told delegates at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). The British union claimed it had collated evidence to suggest the websites were causing teachers untold distress and trauma.
NASUWT said the websites it had examined in Britain not only extended the opportunities for pupils to humiliate teachers by providing the facility for them to post insulting comments, but they actively encouraged such abuse of school staff.
The Irish website — ratemyteacher.ie — has said its rules are specific. Any comments which are sexual in nature, or refer to a teacher’s physical appearance or personal life, will be deleted, the operators warned.
Also, during the education section of the conference, the contentious issue of class sizes was raised. Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) member Patricia Rowe claimed students were being treated like “second class citizens” with teachers only able to give an average of one minute a day to each pupil in their overcrowded classrooms.
Delegates were told Ireland was 29th out of 30 in the Organisation for Economic Co-operations and Development countries when it came to expenditure on each second level pupil relative to the country’s expenditure a head.
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