“Principals joke with each other that this time of year is like The Hunger Games,” says Paula Mulhall as she continues preparations for new school year at Sandymount Park Educate Together in Dublin.
The secondary school has 441 pupils and, as she speaks to The Irish Times, a full complement of 34 teachers. She acknowledges, however, that nothing can be taken for granted in the last couple of weeks of the summer break given the scale of teacher shortages, especially in Dublin.
“If I’m short in a particular area and find someone today, I’d be ringing some poor principal looking for a reference and maybe taking the teacher that they have a timetable built around. That’s really, really difficult, very challenging for schools,” she says.
“But it’s a teachers’ market. They’re constantly on the move, maybe closer to home, maybe to teach a subject that they haven’t been able to teach and they want to try out for a range of reasons. So it’s a constant factor..”
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The Educationposts.ie recruitment website lists about 1,000 teaching vacancies of different types in advance of the new term. Some 380 second-level jobs, many of them relating to maths, science or language subject, were listed this week, down slightly down on the same time last year.
Dublin is over-represented among the would-be recruiters. A small number of schools around the city have multiple vacancies.
At Sandymount Park, Ms Mulhall feels fortunate to have everybody she needs on board at this point but the school is not immune to the issue of teacher shortages, she says. It does not offer engineering technology because it has never been able to recruit a suitably qualified teacher. It had to drop home economics because the teacher it used to have moved home to Donegal, where housing was more affordable. The school could not replace this teacher, despite having particularly good facilities.
The availability and cost of accommodation is a recurring theme in conversations with principals. Dublin schools pay an especially high price, they agree, because of rising rents and daunting mortgage requirements. Yet Ruaidhri Devitt at St Ailbhe’s in Tipperary town points to shortages almost everywhere as one of many factors shaping the landscape.
“There’s also the length of time it takes to become qualified now,” he says. “A lot of people are doing four-year degrees then a two-year Professional Masters in Education (PME) ... that’s six years to come out and not be earning a very high wage.”
He, too, has the timetable covered for the new academic year, with 56 teachers in place for 650 pupils – the principals who do not have sufficient coverage tend not to want to advertise the possibility of stand-in teachers, dropped subjects or absence of higher course options. Yet Mr Devitt recalls a maternity leave last year for which he simply could not get a fully qualified teacher despite advertising the vacancy more than once.
The principal of a large school in the west of Ireland, who prefers not to be named, laughs at the notion of getting cover once the academic year is properly under way. He describes the closing weeks of the summer holiday as akin to the end of a football transfer window but, he adds , nobody will relax for a couple of weeks into the term for fear of a late defection. After that: “Find a substitute? You must be joking. Forget about it.”
His school is, he says, in a position to benefit from teachers in Dublin needing to leave the city in order to buy homes, but even in bigger towns in the west, getting on the property ladder on two teachers’ salaries is not straightforward. The starting salary for post primary teachers is approximately €44,000 gross, rising to about €59,000 after 10 years.
This prompts many of those who can to head for the Middle East in search of a deposit.
“I would like to have a greater choice of experienced teachers but what you’re getting is teachers straight out of college because the schools out there won’t hire them at that stage.
“Then, when they get a few years’ experience, they look to take a career break and go to the Middle East, where they can be earning €65,000 to €75,000 tax free, with your accommodation paid for. If it’s a couple, you can probably bank one of those salaries and save €200,000 in three years. You could be here paying rent and you wouldn’t do that in 100 years,” he says.
“So housing is an issue but there are so many issues in teaching ... the salary scale, which needs to be shortened, the fact you’re not given permanent posts, the pupil/teacher ratios, the lack of middle-management positions ...”
Both unions, the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) and Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland, have pointed this week to all of those as being among the factors contributing to shortages. The TUI’s general secretary Michael Gillespie called for , the Government to, among other things, make more posts permanent from appointment, restore promotional opportunities and halve the length of the PME.
The Department of Education, meanwhile, points to a list of existing initiatives and says there are more teachers than ever before. The one thing both sides agree on is that there are still not enough.
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