O’Keeffe blames cuts on 60,000 sick days last year

EDUCATION Minister Batt O’Keeffe has pledged to push ahead with controversial cuts in the education sector — including a reduction in substitute teacher payments — pointing to figures which reveal how teachers called in sick nearly 60,000 times last year without sick notes.

According to the minister, the teachers took 12,734 uncertified sick days on Mondays last year, as well as 12,581 days of leave without a sick note on Fridays.

Mr O’Keeffe went on to say that mid-week uncertified sick leave on Wednesdays and Thursdays came to 11,407 and 11,131 days respectively and in total, teachers took uncertified sick leave 59,992 during the school year.

The minister went on to claim at the Oireachtas Committee meeting that the total cost of substitution cover for uncertified sick leave was €17 million.

The Government intends stopping the uncertified substitute payments from January.

Schools have warned the move will lead to closures or children being sent home because of an inability to have classes supervised.

Fine Gael TD Brian Hayes yesterday urged the minister to reconsider the move, warning it would cause “havoc for schools”.

But Mr O’Keeffe said the amounts of uncertified sick days were “quite a significant number”.

The INTO yesterday hit back at the minister’s claims and said that teachers had top-class attendance records and only took time off when necessary.

“He [the minister] is now trying to blame teachers for taking sick days, creating a misleading impression that teachers take an inordinate amount of sick leave, when the opposite is true,” said general secretary John Carr.

The figures worked out at an average 340 uncertified sick days on any given Monday, just over 0.5% of the teaching population, he said.

It also emerged yesterday the minister cautioned the INTO recently about using “emotive and dangerous” terms such as “Armageddon” or “catastrophic” to describe budget cuts.

“At a time when the private sector is losing jobs everywhere and we are facing an €11.5 billion deficit, I’ve asked for co-operation,” the minister said.

Meanwhile, dissenting TD Joe Behan criticised the planned cuts and said the Government was wrong not see education as the future.

It was a “serious mistake” for the minister to engage trade unions in “verbal volleyball”, added Mr Behan who recently resigned from the Fianna Fáil party over the medical card row.