Lack of full-time jobs ‘forces teachers out’

A lack of full-time work in the first few years of their careers will force more teachers to emigrate, union leaders have said.

With more than one-in-four of its second-level members’ working fewer than full hours, the Teachers’ Union of Ireland said the increased casualisation of the profession is making it harder to find full-time work and permanency.

While many teachers earn contracts of indefinite duration (CIDs) if they have been working at a school for a number of years, the union said this can often be on far less than the 22 timetabled teaching hours that earns full pay.

“Where once second-level teachers applied for permanent jobs, now they apply for hours,” said TUI deputy general secretary Annette Dolan. “Regrettably, it has become the norm in recent times for young teachers to start out on small numbers of hours with no guarantee of their services being retained the following year.

“As a result, there is a worry that the best young graduates will begin to see teaching as a career choice where there is no real level of security. Many may choose to teach in other jurisdictions where more secure teaching positions are available. Alternatively, they may consider other career choices for the same reason.”

Ms Dolan said that, with a normal qualification period of five years to enter the teaching profession and an estimated average of another five years to secure permanency, even this is often on small numbers of hours that see them earning considerably less than the average industrial wage.

“Up to this, they typically work on short-term contracts on part-time hours covering for those teachers on leave of absence,” she said. “Like many others in Irish society, their struggle to meet basic financial commitments is a real one.”

The union wants a system to be introduced to give teachers full-time permanent jobs after a certain number of years of fixed-term contracts, rather than remaining on CIDs on less than full hours, sometimes for up to a decade.

Ms Dolan also called on the Government to insulate education from further cutbacks, following the loss of hundreds of teaching posts at second-level in recent years. It said the equivalent of another 700 teaching jobs will be taken out of the system in September because of changes to how guidance counselling is treated in school staffing.