Plan to help people from mix of backgrounds become teachers

Dozens of more people with disabilities, Travellers, and others from under-represented backgrounds are expected to become teachers every year in a campaign to widen diversity in the profession.

A €2.4m investment in initiatives at a number of colleges over the next three years aims to give such groups a better chance of pursuing and qualifying for teaching careers.

Education Minister Richard Bruton’s focus is to also have more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds at the top of classrooms, in turn offering pupils role models to realise their own potentials.

“By ensuring there are more teachers in place with a personal understanding of the challenges that these groups face, which they can bring to bear on teaching methods, we can undoubtedly see improvements in these outcomes,” he said.

Despite significant investments in supports for schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students, third-level attendance rates remain particularly low for many of those schools. There have been improvements to participation in higher education by students with disabilities, with target set on foot of success to date.

The initiative specifically targeting 120 places in three years on initial teacher education (ITE) programmes for people from these groups is funded through the Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Access to Higher Education (PATH). A range of measures will be run at six centres of excellence, some of them involving alliances of different teacher-training colleges and departments.

At the University of Limerick, the focus will be on retention of students who begin ITE programmes, in light of higher dropout rates generally for students from groups being targeted in the access plan.

Teaching has by far the highest retention rates among all other degree disciplines, but these have disimproved slightly in recent years. University of Limerick (UL) will run an intensive programme to help ease the transition for their students to higher education.

Another focus will be to ensure a route into teaching for people with further education qualifications, rather than just those entering directly after Leaving Certificate or as postgraduates. Dublin City University (DCU) will assist students in further education who are interested in teaching to complete an ITE module which they may not then have to take if they enter a relevant course.

Some teacher-training courses will specifically target students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Maynooth University will offer academic supports and mentoring to set aside 20 places for aspiring teachers who attend schools in the Department of Education’s Deis educational disadvantage programme.

Other colleges are planning community outreach hubs, to promote teaching through taster courses and supports for subjects like Irish and maths which have minimum Leaving Certificate requirements for potential entrants.

The two biggest allocations are €750,000 each to Maynooth University and the National Institute for Studies in Education, a consortium of UL, Mary Immaculate College, and Limerick Institute of Technology. DCU has been awarded €450,000, University College Cork will receive €250,000, and more than €200 is allocated to NUI Galway and its constituent St Angela’s College, Sligo.