No debate on threat to halt teaching of English

The possible withdrawal from teaching of English in their row with Education Minister Ruairi Quinn over the replacement of the Junior Certificate may be put to ASTI members in the autumn.

But the proposal was not debated after an attempt to put an emergency motion to the secondary teacher union’s annual convention ended. The leadership explained to delegates in a private session that the question had been largely dealt with by its standing committee and 180-member central executive council earlier this year.

Fintan O’Mahony, a member of the 23-member ASTI standing committee, told the convention that he would withdraw the proposed motion. But he said he would bring it up again at executive level.

The Co Waterford teacher’s motion, which he suggested adding to the agenda at the end of Wednesday’s business, would have directed teachers of English not to deliver the new curriculum which is due for introduction for first-year students from September. However, any refusal to teach the curriculum would put a member in breach of the 1998 Education Act and amount effectively to strike action, But the ASTI’s industrial action mandate does not give it authority to sanction strikes.

ASTI president Philip Irwin said later that the union is in the business of protecting the education system and its standards, so striking is not the first option.

“The issue about English teachers and teaching the syllabus, there are lots of aspects of the syllabus itself we are not in opposition to. But the issue of strike action will be something we will consider again in the autumn depending on how things go,” he said.

ASTI and the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) withdrew this month from co-operation with planning meetings, teacher training or other work for the Junior Cycle Student Award (JCSA), under which Mr Quinn wants teachers to mark their own students’ work.

But Mr O’Mahony suggested on Wednesday that the singling out of English teachers to be first to deliver the new system — to be introduced gradually with new subject courses through to 2019 — was unfair and would leave them under pressure to assess their students when the first planned JCSA testing would begin in 2016.

The question of marking their own students for coursework and final exams — although Mr Quinn’s plan would see written papers in English, Irish and Maths still marked by the State Examinations Commission in the early years of JCSA — is the key concern of both unions in the dispute.

The TUI has a mandate up to and including strike action since its ballot on the issue last month. But a motion seeking to ballot its members on not teaching the new English curriculum was defeated at TUI congress after general secretary John MacGabhann warned that anyone who refused to teach the course could run the risk of being sacked.