Sometimes, not always, Government will announce or leak that it is “considering” a particular policy. The purpose of doing this is to test the temperature of the water, and see what the public reaction might be. If it’s anything from enthusiasm, to quiet disinterest, then, full steam ahead. If, by contrast it is “are you mad?” then the thing will usually be quietly dropped, and hopefully you will forget it was ever considered.
This one, I suspect, will be quietly dropped:
‘Scapegoats’: Teachers across the country have voiced opposition and disbelief in response to reports that Education Minister Norma Foley is considering suspending career breaks as part of urgent measures to tackle staff shortages.#gript https://t.co/W362Mses28
— gript (@griptmedia) December 7, 2022
It is something of an unusual approach, to complain on the one hand that insufficient numbers of people are considering taking up teaching, and then to announce that the solution to this will be to remove a benefit from teachers already in the profession. Not only does one risk making teaching less attractive to new entrants, but, worse than that, one might actually push a meaningful number of existing teachers towards the door.
Teachers have it tough, let’s be honest – and I write this not simply because I am married to one. They are, almost uniquely in the public sector, subjects of scorn. Their long holidays are envied, even though the holidays are designed for school children, not school staff. What’s more, in recent decades, less and less of their work has been about actually teaching children, and, following a western trend, more and more of their work has been about safeguarding, and filling in forms, and attending meetings. During the pandemic, they were made, at times, public enemy number one.
Discipline in schools has been watered down to the extent that many teachers, when you talk to them, will tell you that they now have basically no options but to accept abuse from problem pupils, and problem parents. In recent years, the curriculum for the Junior Cert has been modified to make classrooms proceed at the pace of the weakest student, and to entrust teachers with marking their own students at Junior level. In this year’s leaving cert, there was a major shortage of teachers willing to mark papers – the hours are long, and the pay is low. Where once teaching was a prestige job, now, for many of them, it feels like a life sentence.
The Government is blaming a lack of housing for a lack of teachers, particularly in urban areas. That is, of course, a classic Government line: Housing is now one of those problems which Government treats as unsolvable, and unsolvable problems are also known, in the political world, as excuses. Another reason that they can’t get teachers is that the job simply isn’t very attractive.
One problem here simply is that teachers are already so unpopular – which is deeply unfair – that Government does not seem to believe that there is any political solution to a problem in Education which does not involve taking the stick to its own staff. And yet, the more they do that, the fewer staff they have.
An alternative approach would be to do what they do with nurses, and hospital consultants: Increase the pay, especially for new entrants. And address the issues in schools which make the job unattractive. For example, almost all schools are required, as a box ticking exercise, to hold “Croke Park” meetings after school once every fortnight, under the terms of the eponymous wage agreement made during the bust.
The reason for those meetings is solely, and purely, that they improve productivity stats in the public sector: Because they are extra hours worked, they go down on the books as more bang for your buck. But for teachers, it’s often an extra, entirely pointless, mandatory evening away from their families and children. “Soul destroying” is a word that comes up regularly.
The other solution, frankly, is for the public to stop being so anti-teacher. This particularly became an issue during the pandemic, where many teachers were unfairly accused in the media and on talk shows of being, effectively, layabouts doing nothing – even though they had not closed their own schools, and hardly any attention was given to many other people claiming pandemic unemployment payments for, literally, doing nothing.
But mainly, even if you disagree with all that, Government needs to have a tiny bit of common sense: You don’t attract more people into a job by making that job a little bit more painful, and a little bit harder to take a break from. This is an idea that should go straight in the bin. And it probably wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day, had we a Minister for Education with the ability to stand up to her own officials. The problem is, we do not.
And by the way, isn’t Norma Foley, like the Taoiseach and many others in Leinster House, a teacher on a career break? Oh no – when they go into politics, it’s called a secondment. A different class of thing altogether.
How remarkably convenient.