OPINION:It's too easy to denounce teachers as 'whingers'. This week's conferences reflected very real concerns about our underfunded education system, writes SEÁN FLYNN.
THE TEACHER-BASHING season, as teachers like to label it, should be in full swing in the Sunday papers tomorrow after a week in which the teacher conferences hogged the media spotlight.
The usual cliches will be rolled out. Teachers are moaners and whingers, with cushy numbers and long holidays. They will be depicted as a group living on a different planet from the rest of us, in a world where harsh economic reality rarely intrudes.
Before rolling out these cliches, it might be instructive for critics to sit in on the teacher conferences.
The most striking feature of all three teacher conferences in Letterkenny, Killarney and Cork respectively was the desperate wish of INTO, ASTI and TUI delegates to protect and nurture our underfunded education system in the interests of children, yours and mine.
Yes, there was something contrived about those walkouts when Batt O’Keeffe rose to address delegates at each conference.
Yes, there remains a core group of (mostly elderly) teachers who are far too sensitive about even the faint whiff of media criticism.
Yes, there was a good proportion of self-serving stuff this week on the public sector pension levy and on the promotions embargo.
All told, there was no shortage of ammunition for critics. They will, no doubt, snipe that the week-long circus was all a bit rich coming from well-off teachers with their mortgages paid and holiday homes in Vilamoura.
Only, there is one problem: this much-recycled view is completely out of touch with the reality of life for most teachers. These days, close to 50 per cent of the 60,000 teaching force are under 35.
Most, like Anna O’Loughlin, the 28-year-old Dublin teacher who became the media star of the INTO conference, are suffering with the rest of us.
O’Loughlin’s story is not untypical. She is a language-support teacher, wrestling with negative equity and fixed mortgage repayments of over €1,648.51 a month on her home at Jobstown in Tallaght.
She had been hopeful of gaining a promotional post shortly, something which might alleviate her personal financial crisis, but these posts have been closed off by the Government embargo.
The most striking feature of O’Loughlin’s story was her matter-of-fact insistence there was nothing special about her case. Scores of teaching colleagues are struggling with the same financial plight, she said.
Anna O’Loughlin’s story attracted attention but not just because it exposed the hard times facing teachers. It also shed light on the manner in which our education system is being systematically run down.
O’Loughlin teaches in a disadvantaged school in Dublin’s Stoneybatter where 50 per cent of the pupils are foreign nationals, mostly from Romania, Slovakia and the Caribbean. Despite this, the school has seen the number of language-support teachers cut from five to three. In recent months, teachers have had to wrestle with a series of other cold-hearted and shameful cuts. Library support for schools was cut to save a miserable €7.5 million; 123 classes supporting children with mild learning needs will be abolished in September; and supports for Travellers have been scaled back.
If teachers sounded indignant and angry about these cuts this week they had every right to be. There is a palpable anger in the profession about the way the vulnerable and the most disadvantaged have been targeted. There is real concern among individual teachers about how their own classes in their own schools will be affected.
There was also the sense that teachers spoke for many of us this week when they spoke out against what they called the “casino capitalists” and the “economic traitors”.
Teachers have every reason to be angry about the barren legacy of the Celtic Tiger. After almost two decades of unprecedented economic growth, the Republic has the second largest class sizes in the EU and our spending on education in relation to our wealth is next to bottom of the OECD table.
Our science laboratories are more likely to be a health and safety risk than a shining beacon of the Smart Economy. And the roll-out of school computers lags well behind our international competitors.
At an individual level in schools, most teachers must still make do without the classroom facilities and supports which are taken for granted elsewhere. Most teachers do not have ready access to their own study room, let alone a colour photocopier. Thousands continue to teach in prefabs.
And things will get worse before they get better. This summer, some 2,000 fully qualified teachers will graduate with virtually no job prospects.
When the teachers spoke out this week, they did so with sincerity and conviction. They are sounding the alarm about the systematic running down of our education system. They appreciate, perhaps more than the rest of us, how cuts in special needs, language supports and the like are counter productive.
Teachers performed a singular public service this week when they stood up and spoke out. They deserve praise, not the usual opprobrium.
Seán Flynn is Education Editor of The Irish Times