The TUI has threatened "sustained and widespread industrial action" if its demand for statutory representation on Vocational Education Committees (VECs) is not met by the end of the year.
General secretary Mr Jim Dorney said the Minister for Education had hoped new VEC legislation incorporating teacher and parent representation would be ready in time for June's local elections, but "pressure of Dail business and difficulties in the parliamentary draughtsman's office" would lead to this deadline being missed.
The new time-scale is for the completion of legislation "guaranteeing teacher representation" by October. The old-style VECs will be set up again after the local elections. However, they will be disbanded once the new legislation is ready, and the new, broader-based VECs will replace them, said Mr Dorney.
He said it was important that first-time teachers, rather than politicians by themselves, would serve on the "core committee" of VECs, which would then choose the other members.
TUI president Mr Joe Carolan said they were "bitterly disappointed that they had been let down again on this issue".
Addressing the Minister of State for Education, Mr O'Dea, he said: "You can't blame us is we are apprehensive and suspicious - we have had a long litany of broken promises on this issue from successive governments for as long as I can remember."
Executive member Ms Mary Friel said it was also time for industrial action on the issue of extra teachers for the teaching hours lost by the appointment of assistant principals with administrative duties.
"There is no other job in which people are promoted or moved to other duties and their old jobs stay unfilled. If teachers teach four hours less because they take on administrative duties, the students lose four hours teaching." She calculated that about 2,000 hours had been lost in the 500 second-level schools which had gained assistant principals under the Programme for Competitiveness and Work. This had led to a worsening pupil-teacher ratio and class sizes, and a decrease in both the teaching time and the subjects offered to students.
Mr Jim McDonagh, from Kildare, called for the restoration of the ratio of pupils to guidance counsellors from 1:500 to the pre-1983 level of 1:250. He said this would bring cost benefits to the Government by reducing the high drop-out level in first year at colleges by ensuring that second-level students get proper guidance about courses. Mr Barry Walshe, from Cork, said it was not too much to ask that the guidance counsellors ratio be improved in an "era of unprecedented economic growth".