TUI conference: There has been a major decline in the status of teaching in recent years because of low pay, increasing workloads and a lack of investment in schools, TUI president Paddy Healy claimed yesterday.
Opening the union's annual congress in Dublin, Mr Healy said there were a lot of "dangerous signals" for the future of teaching, and if action was not taken soon, the damage would be already done and it would take 10 years to rescue the education sector.
He pointed to the growing failure to attract men into the profession and the mismatch between the subjects offered by third-level graduates doing the HDip and the demand for teachers of certain subjects.
Mr Healy said that an OECD report to be published next month would show that the "status index" for teaching had dropped by almost 50 per cent in the past 10 years.
The status index is a ratio of teachers' pay to Gross Domestic Product per head.
He said there also had been a "major relative decline" in the pay of teachers over the past 10 years.
"The status of Irish teachers has fallen from second to 17th place among the 20 OECD countries for which statistics are available," Mr Healy said.
There was growing concern that these issues would discourage talented young people from becoming teachers.
The TUI president also repeated his opposition to Government plans to ask private operators to compete with Vocational Education Committees (VECs) and Institutes of Technology in a new adult education campaign. And he received loud applause when he criticised the placing of a cap on the number of students doing Post-Leaving Cert courses (PLCs). This was completely indefensible at a time when the Exchequer was "bulging," Mr Healy said.
He hoped the Minister would resolve this issue when she addresses today's congress.
"It is not reasonable to say to a student or a parent: 'I'm sorry, we cannot give you as good an education as we would wish, because we have to build a motorway out of current revenue'," he said. The recent increase in national wealth gave Ms Hanafin a "historic opportunity" to transform Irish education.
Meanwhile, the TUI general secretary Jim Dorney told the congress he believed that one united teacher union, involving the TUI, the Asti, the INTO and the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT), was inevitable.
"The question is how long will it take? We are, I believe, planting the acorn," he said.
