Teacher conferences - Interests of children are paramount

As usual at this time of year there is considerable focus on education as the various teacher unions hold their annual conferences.

The whole education sector has been undergoing dramatic changes in recent years.

So many young people, who would have been about to start families of their own, emigrated in the 1980s that there was a distinct drop in school going population during the 1990s. But recent years have witnessed the essential ending of emigration and the influx of hundreds of thousands of young people from abroad.

There has been an unprecedented influx of children from non-English speaking countries, and these have posed their own challenges to the educational system. Many of those coming from Eastern Europe are particularly good students, because they are eager to learn, but they have to be helped to overcome the language barrier.

In the past five years an extra 5,000 primary teachers have been employed, and the Taoiseach recently promised that a further 4,000 would be hired if Fianna Fáil forms the next government.

Education Minister Mary Hanafin notes that there will be 15,000 new school places this year, and there will be extensions and modernisation to schools attended by 45,000 other pupils.

The different teacher unions have their own particular problems, but it is distinctly noticeable that these are mainly related to the needs and welfare of the pupils and students. Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) president Denis Bohane complained at his organisation’s congress in Cork yesterday that school children are being denied necessities of education because local authorities are requiring schools to pay water and refuge charges.

The Government provides the money to cover the primary and secondary education of children, but schools have to make the water and refuge payments out of their allocations. Those costs are likely to increase with the introduction of water meters.

Some suburban schools have received bills mounting up to €11,000. That money is inevitably depriving children of books, or equipment, and even necessary teachers. With commercial life encroaching on the schools, Mr Bohane called on parents to shop around before purchasing school uniforms.

Every year there is a fuss about the cost of uniforms, but he says that many parents do not bother to shop to find the keenest prices. The INTO president also noted that schools could frequently be more discerning before sending out lists of uniform providers.

Mr Bohane was particularly articulate on the need to prohibit telephone masts within 300 metres of any schools. Children’s bodies are only developing and it is the height of irresponsibility to place telephone masts near schools, because the children are being placed at unquantifiable risks associated with exposure to electric and magnetic fields without the ultimate impact of those being understood.

It is not good enough that people are accepting the data being produced by mobile telephone companies. Society has learned to its enormous cost about accepting health data that was long provided by cigarette companies covering up the dangers of tobacco. Some even suggested that smoking was a healthy habit.

Statistics of a self-serving nature should always be questioned, especially when they involve the health of children.