A football pitch, a rugby pitch, a gym and a swimming pool alert the visitor to Coolmine Community School in Clonsilla, Dublin, that it is heavily involved in sport.
With past pupils such as footballer Mark Kennedy and cyclists Martin Earley and Philip Cassidy, it doesn't seem like a school where teachers throw pupils a ball and go home at 4 p.m.
But the teachers in Coolmine Community School don't think the Minister for Education is aware of this.
"This thing of 22 hours a week is a joke," said Mr Bernard Sexton, a French and music teacher on the pickets yesterday morning. He helps out with choir practice most lunch-times, sports and trips away.
Ms Sarah Russell and Ms Eva Kavanagh gave a long list of sports they sacrificed evenings for, from soccer to basketball and cross-country running; Olympic handball to debating and Gaelic games.
Both women said they didn't mind doing it, but they'd rather have the time and energy they put in outside the classroom recognised.
"That's what annoys me the most," said Ms Patricia Foran. "They are not looking at the wider picture."
As year head she is in charge of 230 pupils and has to deal with their problems, queries from parents and the problems teachers are having with pupils.
"Your time is not your own," she added.
Then there are the three-month holidays. "I worked all last summer doing administration in UCD and finished on the Friday and started back at school on the Monday," Ms Kavanagh said. The summer job wasn't for extra spending money, it was to get by during the rest of the year, she said.
Mr Sexton takes courses in French over the summer, often in France. "It's not even so much to brush up on your French as to keep up with changing methodologies," he said.
Preparation for courses and marking homework and exams also helped erode teachers' time off, according to Ms Kavanagh. "My friends call saying `Are you not coming out?' I tell them `No, I've got 60 copies to mark'," she said.
But the bottom line for these teachers is pay. "The money my friends are earning now is what I will retire on," said Ms Kavanagh, an Irish teacher who has been working for six years but does not yet have a permanent job.
"If you take some people who have been teaching for 25 or 28 years and they are still on salaries under £30,000 it's ludicrous, and that's with a minimum of four years at third level," the deputy principal, Mr Micheal de Barra, said.
"My nieces and nephews earn double what I earn," Ms Phil Solan, a teacher for 26 years, said.
Ms Russell travels from her house in Naas every day as she can't afford a house in Dublin. The journey both ways adds two hours to her day and petrol comes to about £250 a month. Another teacher in the school recently bought a house in Mullingar, she added.
A science teacher, Mr Brendan O'Donoghue, said he feared teaching would be devalued if teachers were not given an increase in their salaries. Fewer teachers would join the profession and more would leave.
For Ms Kavanagh this prospect is becoming a strong possibility. "I would like to stay in teaching but there does come a point where you say `God, I'm being taken for a mug'."