ASTI calls for measures to ensure safe and quality education

As the Government prepares for the reopening of schools, all necessary resources must be put in place to ensure teachers and students can be assured of safe and quality education, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) has said.

“The pandemic has demonstrated its own resilience, and there is no doubt that enormous challenges remain to be overcome in the months ahead,” said ASTI president Eamon Dennehy.

Mr Dennehy, who is an engineering teacher from Heywood Community School and a member of the ASTI Laois branch, was recently appointed president of the union which represents 18,500 second-level teachers across Ireland.

He called on the Government to commit to “sustained and enhanced investment” in second-level education that would enable schools to “recover and prosper” as Ireland moved out of the pandemic.

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He also said Irish secondary school teachers were enduring “enormous and unsustainable workloads” because of the lack of State investment in second-level education, He warned that difficulties in recruitment and retaining second-level teachers had “bedevilled the system for several years”, even before the pandemic, adding that underlying causes, such as unequal pay, needed to be addressed.

Mr Dennehy said Ireland ranked last out of 35 countries for national investment in the sector, according to research carried out two years ago by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD.

The report found that Ireland invested just 1.2 per cent of its GDP on second-level education in 2016 compared with the OECD average of 2 per cent and an EU average of 1.9 per cent.

“The high levels of precarious teaching contracts and pay inequality for teachers in the earlier years of their careers ensures that the system is not best placed to meet the challenges that the coming years will present,” he said. “It cannot be allowed to continue.”