Teachers' deal would hand more control to churches

WHEN he was Minister for Education in the 1950s Gen Richard Mulcahy described his role as being like that of a "dungaree man" who will stake a knock out of the pipes and will link up everything." This notion of a Minister for Education as a kind of low grade maintenance engineer, on call with spanner, oily rag and improvisational knack to keep the system going was typical enough of the times. It was the same kind of attitude that handed children over to the care of brothers and nuns in orphanages and industrial schools and took it for granted that the public duty of care had thus been fulfilled.

The time when the management of the education system was merely a matter of taking the knock out of the pipes is long gone, and in the last few years a Green Paper, a national education convention and a White Paper have all acknowledged as much. The job in hand is the construction, not the maintenance, of a modern education system, one that serves the needs of young people in a society where knowledge and economic power have become inextricable, and one that starts from the premise that the values to be embodied are pluralist and democratic, not sectarian and authoritarian.

It was very odd last week, therefore, that at the same time as the abject failure of the old attitudes to education were being exposed in revelations about orphanages, a major initiative in education was, perhaps unwittingly, shoring up the old system. At a time when the need to diminish the institutional power of the churches in the education system has never been so obvious, even to very many people within the churches themselves, last week's £67 million pay package for teachers threatens to increase it significantly.

IN 1962, only 43 per cent of secondary teachers were lay people. Now well over 90 per cent are. But despite the decline in the actual religious input into the system, the degree of religious influence has not significantly diminished. Indeed, when you consider how much the system as a whole has grown, with a vast increase in the absolute numbers of students at secondary schools, it is not unreasonable to say that religious influence now counts for far more than it used to. It is basically the same degree of control over a much bigger system.

That control is quite emphatic. As "trustees", the religious orders don't just control the management of the schools, they also decide how to exercise that control, whether through a principal alone or with a board of management. Even when a board of management is appointed, as is the case in most secondary schools, it is still very much dominated by the trustees. As the Conference of Religious of Ireland, which represents the Catholic teaching orders, has put it: "The trustee is regarded as the guardian of the ethos of the school". And the "ethos" means everything: "the whole organisation of the school, its teachers, syllabus, textbooks, etc."

Liam Murphy, chairman of the Joint Managerial Body for secondary schools, made it clear two years ago that the defence of the ethos of schools was being achieved through the effective control of boards of management. The trustees retain the right to nominate a majority of the board, including the chairperson, and "in exceptional cases, where the board of management is frustrating the fundamental aims, character and ethos of the school, the trustees reserve the right to disband the board." These "aims, character and ethos" amount to "the responsibility of the trustees to ensure that the schools under their authority are managed in a manner that is consistent with the stated aims and philosophy of the religious congregation or diocese concerned."

One of the most significant areas of control, of course, is that of the appointment of teachers. Being able to appoint only those teachers whose views are consistent with the philosophy of the religious order or the diocese is a very real power, and the religious orders have resisted any change that might "reduce the direct input of trustees in the selection of staff". It is entirely logical, from their own point of view, that they should do so.

BUT it is not at all logical from the point of view of a society committed to the principles of a pluralist democracy. The public interest lies in having teachers appointed because they are best able to teach. Public servants paid almost entirely from State funds should not be required to uphold the philosophies of private interests. In any case, the efficient use of public resources to ensure that young people get the best possible education demands that the criteria for appointment and promotion for teachers should be professional, not religious, ones.

Yet one of the things that will happen if the new pay package put forward by Niamh Bhreathnach, goes through is that the trustees will have their power over staff appointments greatly increased. At the moment, the exercise of that power is effectively confined to the actual appointment of a teacher. Once appointed, the teacher is promoted more or less automatically, acquiring a "post of responsibility" if at all through the operation of a Buggin's turn system of seniority. There are very good reasons for wanting to change such a system, and to open up these promotions to competition and merit. But there are even better reasons for not doing so unless and until the control over schools has been made more open.

The problem is that Niamh Bhreathnach is proposing to create new posts while leaving the control of the trustees in place. Not just initial staff appointments but also a whole range of middle management posts in schools will be in the gift of the religious orders. These appointments - and about 4,500 of them are envisaged under the package - will be made by a group comprising a nominee of the trustees, the principal appointed by the trustees and a nominee of the board of management on which the trustees have an automatic majority. And they will be made, on the explicit statements of the religious orders, on the basis of the "stated aims and philosophy of the religious congregation or diocese".

What it comes down to is that the public will pay a lot of money to increase the day to day power of private religious institutions over the lives and careers of public servants. The criteria for a whole range of new posts funded by the Exchequer will not just be whether the person can do the job well, but also whether the appointment will further the aims of a particular religious order and a particular diocese. What sense does this make in a society which is supposed to be making itself more pluralist and more democratic?

We have seen in recent child sex abuses cases how important it is for teachers to be independent of clerical and episcopal pressure. We have seen in the Goldenbridge orphanage revelations just how dangerous it is for public responsibilities to be passed over to private institutions. But neither these lessons nor the bigger one that the future of this island depends on the creation of a pluralist culture are reflected in what, for the public, looks like a conspicuously bad deal.