ASTI CONFERNCE/GENERAL SECRETARY'S ADDRESS:TEACHERS ARE being distracted from their real work by a populist modernisation programme that places bureaucratic burdens on schools involving "endless paper trails", a trade union leader claimed yesterday.
John White, general secretary, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, told delegates at the union's annual conference that members had no intention of giving any further "bureaucratic productivity".
He criticised "anti-public service warriors", who made "blanket statements" about reform of the public service and reiterated his union's "bitter disappointment" with the recent report of the second benchmarking body.
The fact that teachers received no increases reflected profound changes in the global economy where "market forces are triumphant and operate with the minimum of regulation," Mr White said.
His members had engaged in "real modernisation, not the populist but ultimately superficial modernisation such as the standardisation of the school year," he continued.
"Of course we favour reform and we have delivered as part of our professional work as teachers, but bureaucratic impositions add nothing to the quality of our work in the classroom and that is the criterion by which reform should be judged," he said.
Despite Irish schools coming near the bottom of the OECD tables on funding, they had overseen the successful integration of international students and those with special needs, and had introduced new developments such as transition year and the Leaving Certificate applied and vocational programmes.
"We deliver a quality education across the entire education system . . . it is galling, therefore, to read blanket statements from certain politicians and right-wing commentators about reform of the public service," he said. "I wonder how many of those would survive in the modern classroom."
He pointed out that while teachers are to receive cumulative pay increases worth 5 per cent in 2008, inflation was currently running at 4.8 per cent.
Talks on module two of the national pay deal, Towards 2016, are likely to begin in late April or early May, he said, and the four teacher unions had adopted a position paper with regard to the talks.
"At every meeting, we have stated that since the value of the last module was eaten away by inflation, we have no intention of giving any further bureaucratic productivity," he said.
"These talks will be difficult . . . but if the talks collapse, they collapse, it will not break certainly my heart if that happens. There will then be a public service deal which will be negotiated in the same way."
It was a measure of the vital importance of the work of second-level teachers that the media highlighted the issue of underperforming teachers "at every opportunity", Mr White said.
But teachers had "nothing to fear" when it came to a planned new disciplinary process for teachers, he said, and blaming the media was a "waste of time and energy".