Pawel Grucela (14) loves fixing bikes and putting broken appliances back together. His dream, he says, is to be an engineer when he leaves school.
Now, he worries his hopes of following his dream career are at risk.
He chose three practical subjects for second year: woodwork, metalwork and technical graphics. However, the school has been unable to find teachers for any of these subjects for most of the school year.
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“I was really excited about doing those subjects, they would be useful for university,” says Grucela, who lives near Tyrellstown in west Dublin. “But for the first two and half months until mid-term we were sitting in free classes doing nothing. After that, we were forced to choose different subjects. I’ve ended up with Spanish, science and classical studies, but that’s not what I wanted to do,” he says.
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Pawel isn’t alone. A group of concerned parents and educators in the Blanchardstown area of west Dublin estimate that four out of five secondary schools in the area are missing teachers across key subjects, forcing them to drop subjects or hire unqualified individuals or “out of field” teachers to plug gaps.
The Education Coalition Dublin West group has organised a public meeting on Monday evening to draw attention to what it describes as a “teacher shortage crisis”. Teachers’ union leaders, local politicians, teachers and pupils are due to speak about how the issues are affecting students in local schools.
Surveys by teachers’ unions indicate it is also a national problem. The latest poll by the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) found that three-quarters of school leaders reported receiving zero applications for some advertised teaching posts in the current school year. There were unfilled teaching vacancies in almost half of second-level schools, while almost a fifth of schools were forced to remove a subject or subjects from the curriculum as a result.
Priority issue?
Kate Relihan and Andrea Fitzpatrick, the meeting’s core organisers, feel the problem is getting worse. ”Schools are doing their best, but they can’t find the teaching staff,” she says. “We feel that nothing is being done. The housing crisis is a real problem. We’ve been told of one school campus locally where four teachers face eviction in the summer. Young teachers, especially, can’t afford to rent.”
Minister for Education Norma Foley says it is a priority issue. Among the measures aimed at boosting teacher supply include allowing student teachers to provide more substitute cover; lifting financial penalties for retired teachers providing cover, allowing job-sharing teachers to work in a substitute capacity during the period they are rostered off and sharing teachers across schools. Other medium-term measures may take several years to bear fruit such as an increase in the number of places on teacher upskilling programmes in priority subjects.
Relihan, however, says the group is urging the Government to take more radical action such as setting aside a portion of new housing for emergency workers, restoring allowances for qualified teachers and cushioning the financial cost for trainee teachers.
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Meanwhile, Eva Evans Clake (15) is worried. She is facing into her Junior Cycle exams next month but says her class has been without full access to a business studies teacher until February of this year.
“I want to do my best and put my best foot forward in the exams, but we’ve missed so much time. We haven’t covered the course and it’s causing us more stress and anxiety, on top of the exams,” she says.
Accountancy, she says, accounts for 180 out of 270 marks in the exam.
”We only started it in February … My real worry if that we’ll be facing into the Leaving Cert soon. I’ve decided to do fourth year in the hope that it will be on the path to being solved before I get into fifth year.”
‘I’m devastated’
Her mother Fiona says all three of her children, who attend different schools in the Dublin 15 area, have had their education disrupted due to staffing shortages.
“I’m devastated for her and the others. Children are our future and they have a basic right to education,” she says. “These are the people who will be our leaders, building our houses — yet we’re not giving them the tools they need.
”The irony is that if I didn’t send my children to school, Tusla would be on my back. Yet we sent them to school and they’re not being taught, in some cases.”
* A public meeting on teacher shortages is due to take place in the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Blanchardstown, on Monday, May 22nd at 7.30pm
