The Minister for Education and Science, Dr Woods, has called on the "goodwill and support" of people around the country to ensure that 130,000 Leaving and Junior Certificate students sit their exams this summer.
Advertisements will be placed in national newspapers this week seeking people to supervise the exams. It is expected that university graduates will be employed and trained to mark the papers if necessary.
The Minister said he was confident the public would recognise the fundamental need to ensure students are not prevented from sitting their examinations and that the same "civic spirit" would be demonstrated in this situation as had been the case with the foot-and-mouth crisis.
Department officials will meet the school management bodies and parents to seek their full support for the alternative arrangements and an inter-departmental task force has been established to co-ordinate the plan at national level.
Dr Woods said in a statement he was "aghast" that the ASTI central executive council could "peremptorily dismiss" the Labour Court recommendation without permitting its members to exercise a democratic voice in the decision to accept or reject the terms proposed.
Accusing the union of "bullying" secondary school students into submission, the Minister said that once again the independent body had pointed to the benchmarking process as the most appropriate forum for the teachers' pay claim. Mr Charlie Lennon, general secretary of the ASTI, defended the union's decision to resume its strike from next Wednesday and called for "direct Government intervention" to end the dispute. Speaking on RTE Radio 1 yesterday, Mr Lennon said his members had been "very distressed" by the Labour Court recommendation, which had offered them "nothing new".
"When you strip it back it was offering the same terms that were offered in the teachers' conciliation council almost a year ago," he said.
Stating that there was clearly public support for the pay claim, the union leader said there had been many statements from organisations representing parents and also from the Labour Court saying there was a substantive basis for a major pay claim.
In any trade union situation, withdrawing labour was the "bottom line". This was not something teachers particularly wanted to do because of its effects on students, but the ASTI had been left with "no option", Mr Lennon said.