TUI conference: It’s ‘ill advised’ to Facebook friend students

Teachers have been warned to think carefully about becoming friends on Facebook with their students.

The general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland John MacGabhann told delegates at its annual conference in Cork that such moves were “ill advised”.

“On balance, we must advise that this tends to narrow the necessary professional distance that should be maintained.

“Virtual friendships can wax and wane. Photographs can quickly lose their context. People – however innocent their intent – can be professionally damaged and compromised.”

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Mr MacGabhann also warned teachers about comments they may make on social media and said some TUI members had “occasionally endangered their employment and landed themselves in the stew legally”.

Speak in haste

He said there was a growing tendency – from which some of the union’s members were not immune – to speak electronically and therefore indelibly in haste, or worse still, in anger.

“Words thus spoken cannot be recalled and sometimes betray a person’s worst instincts, where pause and prudence would suggest a different course, content and tone.

“Our strong advice is to be slow and circumspect in committing words to the electronic page. Pause before you press. Think. If you have any inkling that what you are about to send carries risk, don’t send it. The immediate gratification of scratching an itch might be short lived.

“Equally, avoid being drawn into complicity or cahoots with one side or the other in an on-line falling-out or feud. What should be settled off-line between two antagonists now far too frequently turns into a cyber spectator sport in which settling issues is made very difficult. Life is too short for such nonsense.”

Mr MacGabhann also criticised some employers for “irresponsible and over-bearing use of information technology and social media to effectively place staff on a 24/7 roster”.

Meanwhile the conference urged that procedures should be negotiated with education partners in order to protect teachers against unfounded and/or malicious allegations made by a parent or teacher.

Maria Curtin from Limerick said while there were clear procedures for parents and students in relation to misconduct by staff, there were no clear procedures for union members to counteract unfounded allegations.

Levy for education

The union also proposed that the Government should introduce a 1 per cent levy on corporation profits to generate a dedicated fund to finance higher education.

Mr MacGabhann said there was a funding crisis in third-level education which needed to be addressed urgently. He said such a levy on corporation profits would have realised €550 million in 2015.

He argued that the introduction of a student loan scheme which was favoured in the recent Cassells expert group report represented privatisation in education, rather than investment.

“Adding to personal debt or creating a newly indebted generation by way of income contingent loans is neither financially nor socially appropriate. In any event, the income contingent loan scheme, conceived of a stallion by the Cassells expert group, has the cut of a gelding. It won’t work.”

Separately the conference heard that the TUI is to seek pay parity for teachers appointed since 2011 and the reversal of cuts and earning freezes experienced over recent years by other teachers in forthcoming talks with the Government on a successor to the Lansdowne Road agreement.

TUI president Joanne Irwin said the €1,000 pay rise for teachers and other public service personnel, which was brought forward by several months to the beginning of April, represented merely a step in the right direction.

She also argued that all teachers who were in the revised public service pension scheme introduced in January 2013 should no longer be required to pay the current public service pension levy.

She said the revised scheme, under which benefits were determined by career average earnings, “had a disproportionately pronounced effect” on those working in jobs with long salary scales.