A chara, – In discussing the Vatican's Amoris Laetitia ("We do not need religion to calibrate our moral compass", Second Opinion, April 26th), Dr Jacky Jones highlights the difficulties the Catholic Church's latest offering will create for teachers trying to teach the social, personal and health education (SPHE) curriculum in our schools.
Dr Jones mentions the anti-bullying resource “Different Families: Same Love”, designed by the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation to address homophobic bullying in primary schools, and questions whether teachers will feel able to use it. The poster uses the family as a way to initiate discussions on different ways of being, highlighting the variety of different family types which exist in Ireland today. Dr Jones makes the point that the Vatican’s stance on families that fall outside of the nuclear family may pose problems for teachers in Catholic schools who wish to include LGBT-headed families or other non-traditional families in their classroom discussions.
While teachers may feel under pressure to conform to a school’s “ethos”, it is important to note that the Department of Education’s anti-bullying guidelines (2013) clearly state that all schools, regardless of religious ethos, must have policies and procedures in place which proactively tackle homophobic and transphobic bullying. The distressing statistics on self-harm and suicide revealed in the recent LGBTIreland report clearly demonstrate the negative impact that bullying can have on children’s mental wellbeing. Issues of bullying aside, a child’s family is the foundation from which they construct their own self-image and it is important that all children have the opportunity to feel proud of their family and have it valued, regardless of what shape it takes.
As teachers, our first and foremost responsibility is to safeguard and protect the young people in our care. Teachers in State-funded schools should not feel the need to second-guess themselves when using the national curriculum to do this. – Is mise,
NIALL CALLAN,
INTO LGBT
Teachers’ Group,
Irish National
Teachers’ Organisation,
Parnell Square,
Dublin 1.