INTO MEMBERS have a responsibility to ensure that only qualified teachers are employed at their schools, the Dáil has heard.

“The INTO has given a very clear indication to all its members not to work with unqualified teachers,” Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn said.

Mr Quinn recently issued a circular to schools directing them to give preference to young unemployed teachers rather than retired teachers and to qualified rather than unqualified teachers, should a substitute be required.

The circular also advised that an unregistered teacher could be employed on this basis for a maximum of five days.

Pressed by Fianna Fáil education spokesman Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan) to implement a “zero tolerance” approach to unqualified and retired teachers, Mr Quinn indicated that it was up to teachers to ensure unqualified or retired personnel did not work in their schools.

Mr Smith said the number of unqualified or retired teachers “might be relatively small but the very message is wrong” if it meant newly qualified people would be denied a teaching opportunity and “a person with a damn good pension is back in the classroom”.

The Minister told him however that the INTO had directed its members not to work with unregistered personnel. He said school principals were also members of the INTO, the primary teachers’ trade union. “They are the people who make the decision” to hire substitute or retired teachers.

He added that any decision to employ an unregistered person “is a local decision made by the school authorities and not by my department” and “really, the circular we issued is directed to them”.

“It is not good enough that we have young teachers struggling to get work and yet schools around the country are hiring retired people to fill substitute positions” as well as unregistered teachers, Mr Smith said. He referred to Mr Quinn’s commitment to ask officials to “examine the pension consequences for retirees returning to teach” and he asked the outcome.

On the Minister’s circular, he said it asked schools to keep a list of registered teachers. “Does your inspectorate know are all the schools abiding by this direction?”

The Minister wants schools to have a panel of potential substitute teachers in place and the list will be “open to scrutiny by members of the school community” including the board of management, parents and “perhaps a wider public if necessary”.

Mr Quinn said during education questions they were still working on the “detail and operational modalities” of the system but he hoped to have it in place by autumn.

“Ideally what I want for the forthcoming academic year is a panel system where parents and others who are interested will know that if a vacancy arises on short notice that the substitute will be drawn from that list.

“That’s the ideal situation as far as we’re concerned and we’re moving towards it.”

Mr Quinn acknowledged the question of retired and unqualified teachers was “hotly debated” at the INTO conference after Easter, but the INTO was very clear in its instruction to teachers not to work with unqualified personnel.