PARENTS, school managers and opposition politicians have expressed concern that the exam preparations of 60,000 Leaving Certificate students are being disrupted by an industrial dispute involving a small number of civil servants at the Department of Education.
Fianna Fail's education spokesman, Mr Micheal Martin, said yesterday the dispute in the Department's Athlone offices meant the 60,000 students were a month overdue in receiving their exam numbers and other vital documentation which needed to be checked and returned.
This is in addition to 3,600 Applied Leaving Certificate students who have had their task work assessments postponed indefinitely. Mr Martin demanded that the Minister should "announce contingency plans to cope with the evolving administrative mayhem in her department."
A Department of Education spokesperson said the exam numbers were sent out yesterday.
The dispute involves 40-50 executive and higher executive offices, members of the Public Service Executive Union, at Athlone, and around 150 elsewhere. For the past month they have been refusing to take on new work or provide cover for vacancies because of staffing shortages caused by increases in their workload resulting from the implementation of several new programmes in the Department.
Contacts between the PSEU and the Department are continuing, although there has been no face to face meeting between the two sides for at least two weeks.
Mr George O'Callaghan, general secretary of the Joint Managerial Body, representing secondary school managers, said the computer sheets containing students' exam numbers were usually sent out in mid January. There was a "large administrative job" to be done by schools and students to check and send back the information on them about students names, sex, date of birth, exam subjects and levels to be taken.
He regretted that the industrial dispute was causing "unnecessary extra tension at what is already a tense time for Leaving Cert students".
The spokesman for the National Parents Council (post primary), Mr Nick Killian, said parents were "extremely angry that for the third year in a row students studying for the Leaving Cert are facing disruption and uncertainty caused by industrial action by various staff in the Department of Education".