Dozens of adult education teachers protested in Dublin on Wednesday over job cuts and precarious employment conditions, calling on the State to take action to create certainty for these workers.
Adult education teachers are employed by Education and Training Boards (ETBs) across the country. They teach apprenticeships, post-Leaving Cert (PLC) and literacy courses, as well as a variety of part-time courses aimed at integrating people into communities and workplaces.
While many are employed on contracts of indefinite duration, and therefore guaranteed a certain number of hours each term, there is another cohort who are on fixed-term contracts.
Many people in this group, who have up to three years of consecutive contracts, have now been told that they have no work this coming year.
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“These teachers have been told that they have no jobs to go to in September. They have had three years of employment but did not get a contract of indefinite duration and so now they are being treated as low-hanging fruit because of whatever budgetary chaos is going on in the ETBs. These people are paying the price for that chaos,” James O’Keefe, chair of the Adult Education Teachers Organisation, said outside the Solas office in Dublin 1.
His organisation believes there are up to 100 teachers affected by these job cuts, while many students have also been left in the lurch amid the uncertainty.
“Classes are being lost. We help people back into further education and employment. A lot of our learners were failed first time around by the education system, and they’ve helped to develop the skills they need to navigate society. But now a lot of those classes are being lost,” Mr O’Keefe said.
The Adult Education Teachers Organisation has called on Minister for Further and Higher Education James Lawless to take action to protect these jobs, and for the ETBs to reinstate hours for these teachers.
Giulia Zavatta (39) is an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher at an ETB in Gorey, Co Wexford. She has just completed her first year of teaching there, but does not know if she has a job to go back to.
“At the end of May we were told that we might not have jobs to go back to in September. And as of today, I haven’t heard anything. Classes are supposed to start next week and I don’t know if I’ll have a job to go back to,” she said.
Originally from Bologna in Italy, she has a degree in languages, a master’s in translating and a Celta qualification which allows her to teach English as a foreign language.
She moved to Ireland 12 years ago, and having worked in the insurance industry initially she became an adult education teacher when she realised teaching languages was her passion.
“I just love my job, and so do so many other people [working here], we really care about the learners. It’s such an enriching experience and I would really love to go back to my learners,” she said.
