The increasing workload of teachers is "completely and utterly intolerable" and it must stop because students are suffering, Teachers' Union of Ireland president Paddy Healy said yesterday.
He said teachers and lecturers were being asked to do more work arising from new curricula, new legislation and new impositions under pay agreements. At the same time, there was a "major relative decline" in teachers' pay in the past 10 years.
Mr Healy said fundamental changes must be made to the benchmarking criteria so that teachers' work would be more fairly compared with other sectors. Their pay should be compared to "well-paid" outside employment and there should be no reduction in awards due to permanency and pensions, he said.
The TUI Congress carried a motion that TUI members should be allowed to vote on their conditions of service in any new national pay agreement, instead of it being put to an aggregate vote of all the unions. Delegates also carried a motion directing that the union should not accept any increase in the workload of teachers in return for increased pay, "nor to seek an increase in pay at the expense of working conditions in the name of productivity or otherwise".
The TUI president warned the Department of Education against introducing any form of performance appraisal. Teaching was the most accountable profession in the country, he said, but it would be "the beginning of the end of the successful Irish system" if teachers were appraised by their senior colleagues.
The conference also heard strong opposition to any attempts at introducing redundancy in the teaching profession. Mr Healy said teachers would ballot for strike action if there was any attempt to undermine the permanency of teachers and lecturers.
General secretary Jim Dorney said overstaffing may occur as a result of the introduction of the new contracts of indefinite duration (CIDs) but the union would never agree a provision of redundancy.
