Last year the Teaching Council registered all Irish teachers (primary and secondary) en masse. There was no fee involved. We had to sign a declaration of our details, return it, and, voila we were registered free gratis for the year.

This year, however, the Teaching Council wrote to us, and, in no uncertain terms warned us that we would be struck off the register if we didn’t pay the new €90 annual fee and return our details promptly.

If we let our registration lapse, Áine Lawlor, the Director of the Teaching Council, warned us that state funds would no longer be used to pay us and our salaries would be cut off and we would also have to go through the whole process of registering again.

Approximately 85% of all teachers paid the fee and jumped through the hoop, me included, prior to the 28th of March 2008 deadline.

The whole idea of the Teaching Council was to have a regulatory body similar to the Medical Council et al so that the professionalism of the job could be maintained and even improved upon. The idea was also to weed out the plethora of unqualified teachers that are currently operating in our schools.

I quote:

The Teaching Council was established on a statutory basis in March 2006 to promote teaching as a profession at primary and post-primary levels, to promote the professional development of teachers and to regulate standards in the profession.

Specifically its functions are as follows:

To promote teaching as a profession
To promote the continuing professional development of teachers
To establish and maintain a register of teachers
To establish, publish, review and maintain Codes of Professional Conduct for Teachers which include teaching knowledge, skill and competence
To regulate the teaching profession and
To maintain and improve standards of teaching, knowledge, skill and competence.

I’m appalled to learn that there are unqualified teachers on the Teaching Council register!

This makes the whole Teaching Council a costly joke. Costly because there are almost 53,000 teachers in total in our primary and secondary schools bringing the total take of the Teaching council to an annual take of almost €4,770,000 and a joke because it makes a mockery of the reasons why the Teaching Council was set up first day!

€5 million ….. wow … no wonder the Teaching Council have the most luxurious offices available to man. Their annual report stated how good things were for them in their plush new offices with their state of the art IT facilities and their lightning fast internet speeds.

Give me a break Áine ….. I have to teach in a damp school, I have no office, our satellite broadband is rubbish and I have to bring work home with me … and I have to pay an annual fee of €90, which you say may or may not be tax deducatable because you couldn’t be bothered sorting that out first! And then you register unqualified teachers!

So when are you going to weed out the unqualified teachers?

I guess you can’t do anything until Mary Hanafin enacts the part of the Education Act that will prohibit schools from employing unqualified substitutes.

And why would she be in any rush to do that? There aren’t enough qualified substitutes around to fill in for sick leave etc. (even though the INTO have been warning her of the shortage for years) but the real reason she is slow to enact it is the fact that it will cost her Department of Education and Science money. She also stated recently …. ‘we all have to tighten our belts’ … so this probably means that she will be even slower to enact it now and our schools will still have glorified babysitters minding their pupils!

Some Facts:

• There are almost 900 unqualified personnel are regularly contracted in schools – 620 in the primary sector and 274 in secondary schools, not including those who are brought in now and again to fill in a day here and a day there!
• 143 of the unqualified employees teaching in post primary schools are currently being assessed by the Teaching Council, while the remaining 131 were haven’t been fully recognised because of a lack of qualification in the subject area of the teaching post.
• Qualified teachers are being forced to pay €90 a year each to register with the Council, adding up to around €5 million, while some personnel with no qualifications are being allowed to register for an unspecified period of time under new regulations to be signed in by the Minister later this year.
• Schools are so glad to get anybody in to teach that they’ll take engineers, care workers, artists, etc. You name it …. schools have had that profession ‘teaching’ pupils both short and long term. I won’t get into the whole issue of vetting …. just to say that vetting is the least of the bigger school’s worries when they are looking for a substitute teacher at 9.00 a.m. Monday morning for the 30 eight year olds in second class! (I’ll going to post about the vetting of teachers before the day is out … lots to say there too!)

Have a visit to the Teaching Council …. tell Áine hi from me and tell her Paddy sent you!