This Government Hates Us Teachers

The current government hates teachers. The laughter of the assembled Fine Gael fanboys during Michael O’Leary’s comedy routine last week should leave the 120,000 teachers in this country in absolutely no doubt as to the contempt in which they’re held by that party of bullies and bosses.

As for Fianna Fáil?  They are, if anything, even worse. Norma Foley seems to be engaged in some kind of febrile attempt to get herself into the history books as a kind of yellow-pack Maggie Thatcher trying to face down the unions. 

On Tuesday of this week (the 19th of November) over 30,000 teachers staged a nationwide protest rejecting the Minister’s plan to railroad Senior Cycle reform without consultation with either the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) or the Association of Secondary Teachers (ASTI). 

The proposed reforms are ill-conceived academically and completely under-resourced. 

The syllabi as presented are superficial and, just as with Junior Cycle reform, no teacher guidelines, no sample examination papers, no marking schemes or assessment components have been presented.  

As for resourcing: funding for education in Ireland is already the lowest in the OECD measured as percentage of GDP. Worst of all, DEIS funding stands at about €180 million per year - less than one percent of the overall education budget of about €12 billion.

The government makes a song and dance about DEIS funding to schools in deprived areas, but in truth, it is nothing more than a fig leaf. It is students in DEIS schools who would suffer the most if Foley’s back-of-an-envelope scribbles were ever put into practice.

The Minister’s proposed reforms are nothing more than populist, election-time shape-throwing. But matters took an even more right-wing turn on Thursday November 21st.

Foley made the clownish assertion that the catastrophic teacher shortages affecting schools across the country did not constitute a crisis - rather they were an “opportunity”. 

Presumably when Foley sees schools scrambling to find staff, losing entire subjects or making do with teachers unqualified in certain subjects she thinks it’ll toughen us up. She seems to think that necessity should be the mother of the Hunger Games. I shudder to think what it must have been like for the children in her “survival of the fittest” classroom when she was a teacher.

Blueshirts to the right of us, Neoliberal Norma further the right of us, teachers are stuck in the middle with their unions. What is to be done? Well, there’s an election on 29th November. No teacher in their right mind should vote for either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael. 

People Before Profit has proposals that would revolutionise education in Ireland. For example, we would immediately increase the number of Special Needs Assistants by 2,000 and Special Education Teachers by 1,000, double DEIS funding, double the capitation grant at Primary Level, ensure that every school in the State has an autism class and every school offers a summer programme, end subsidies for private schools and remove the church from management of all schools.

And then, there’s our unions.

Neither the TUI nor ASTI have the culture nor the inclination to be anything other than obedient appendages to the state. This is not because of the rank-and-file membership, far from it. The enthusiasm with which teachers took part in the lunchtime protests on Tuesday 19th shows that there is a willingness to fight.

The bureaucrats in both unions are, however, notoriously conservative, very used to their high salaries and expensive cars and they are absolutely terrified of the prospect of ordinary members pushing for a fighting union. 

Ordinary teachers can change both unions. Push for campaigns to abolish the 1990 Industrial Relations Act, push for participation in a national housing mass movement, push for unions to take proactive steps to fully unionise all teachers and all grades involved in teaching.

Specifically, rank-and-file members need to push the union into a position where we absolutely refuse to take part in any Senior Cycle reform unless the academic and resourcing failures outlined above are addressed well in advance.

In truth, the unions are seeing the results of years of inaction, years of swallowing scraps thrown from the Minister’s table. The TUI is currently balloting its members to take industrial action because the Education and Training Boards were refusing to throw the union any more scraps.

The union complained of “unilateralism, diktat and a culture of autocratic management”. You reap what you sow. If management are finding it impossible to disguise their contempt for the union it is time for ordinary, rank-and-file members to step up and show the bureaucrats how to really fight.