SECOND LEVEL teachers have expressed anger about new Department of Education figures that appear to show they enjoy a relatively light workload compared to their OECD counterparts.
Teachers’ Union of Ireland president Don Ryan yesterday labelled the department’s figures as a “mischievous attempt to undermine a frontline service already under severe strain’’.
The general secretary of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (Asti) John White accused the department of generating “easy headlines” that did not reflect the reality. He said teachers were unwilling to have their “work falsely devalued as part of a softening up process for further education cuts”.
A department memo to the McCarthy report team said second-level teachers spend much less time in their schools than their counterparts in virtually every other OECD state. The department says the “contracted working time required at school” for teachers in the Republic is “one of the lowest in the OECD at primary and secondary level”.
Last night, Mr White said the reality for Irish second-level teachers is that they were in their classrooms teaching their pupils for significantly longer hours than their OECD counterparts.
The memo acknowledges that the actual teaching time in Ireland is high by international standards.
But it also said the contracted working time required at second level for teachers in Ireland is 735 hours per year, about 40 per cent less than the OECD average of 1,214 hours per year.
Mr White said that teachers engage in a huge variety of tasks in addition to classroom teaching including class preparation, setting and marking homework, administrative work, subject planning, and pastoral care activities.
The OECD, he said, analysed the value for money of teachers throughout the OECD in terms of their salary, teaching time and GDP per capita. Ireland’s second-level teachers are sixth out of 28 states in value for money terms.
Mr Ryan said the memo reflects only the core hours spent teaching and does not embrace other wide-ranging and essential functions and tasks undertaken by teachers.
He said the figures represented an ill-informed commentary in respect of how much time teachers work.
He said an independent study by market researchers Behaviour Attitudes showed teachers work an average of 20 hours per week in addition to their classroom contact time.
This places the weekly working hours for second level teachers in 40-45 hours range.
He also pointed out that other countries present teachers’ weekly and annual working hours in a format that include tasks in addition to teaching.
