Motion 59 – Education Cutbacks – Teachers’ Union of Ireland
Don Ryan (President)          

Chairperson, delegates

This motion tabled by TUI is not about teachers, is not about pay or conditions.

This is about you and me, our children, the future wellbeing of the country and the social cohesion of our communities

It is about all of us attempting to undo the damage inflicted on our education system from primary to 3rd level over the past 12 months

The vicious and foolhardy decisions taken over the past year have cut the legs from underneath an already creaking education system – a system that was seriously under-funded by international standards. Even when record budget surpluses were declared we languished 27th out of 29 OECD countries when our spending on education was ranked against national wealth.

 Our schools, our colleges and our children are hurting and will hurt more.
The education system in this country has been delivered a near mortal blow.

David Begg in his address to this conference on Tuesday referred to ‘The Threshold of Decency’ that we must not pass. The government of this country overstepped this threshold when they used our children as scapegoats in their attempt to resolve a financial crises caused by their own mismanagement.

While calling for solidarity and patriotism - while protecting the vested interests of the greedy, this government were punishing the most vulnerable, the most educationally marginalised and the most disadvantaged in our society.

• They withdrew funding from disadvantaged schools
• abolished grants for programmes such as the Junior Certificate Schools Programme and the Leaving Certificate Applied that play a vital role for less academically oriented students and encourage them to remain on in school
• slashed capitation funding for Traveller Children
• abolished the Book Grant for hundreds of schools leaving parents to resort to charity for assistance
• increase charges for school transport placing greater financial burden on low income families
• removed Mild Learning Disability classes
• reduced the allocation of language support teachers to schools with high concentrations of newcomer students whom we claim that we want to integrate into our schools and our communities

On Tuesday last we were asked by a speaker at this rostrum to stand up if we the delegates had anything to do with the causes of the country’s economic crises.
Nobody stood up.
The children of this country certainly do not have to stand up either.

Students and schools did not cause the problems. The education and future of our children should not be undermined to solve a financial crisis caused by government ineptitude and by those who had their snouts stuck back to their ears in the trough of the nation’s wealth.

In our attempts to right our listing economic ship we must protect the cornerstones of our society especially education and other essential services. The savings made in penalising our children in order to correct the financial mismanagement of the country must be put against the price the economy and society eventually pays  – in social welfare and health costs as well as in social and general welfare costs of creating a new unemployed urban and rural underclass.
 
Good public services cost money. One of the foundation stones of our way out of the economic crisis in the mid-1980s was to trade wage restraint for improved public services. That was a major part of the partnership agreements. When our national debt in the mid-80s was about 140% of GNP, when inflation was at 15% and when unemployment was at 17%, we didn’t make our education system victim to the problem, as we are doing now.

The agreed partnership deals such as the Programmes for Economic and Social Progress (1991) and The Programme for Competitiveness and Work (1997) spelt out the commitments to social equity under the headings of social welfare, health and education. Social and educational issues such as the assistance towards the provision of school books and the provision of alternative education programmes such as Youthreach,  LCA,  and Literacy were agreed. Expansion of places and resources at 3rd level, upgrading of sub-standard school buildings, improvements in the PTR at primary and second level were part of the agendas. Additional posts and resources for disadvantaged were also agreed.

The ICTU have taken their eye off the ball in relation to issues of social justice

The more recent partnership agreements Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, Sustaining Progress and the totally discredited Towards 2016 have failed to follow through on the social reform agenda and contained very little by way of support for improving public services, education included. (Indeed colleagues I would urge you to read these agreements just to see what we gave and how little we got back other than promises)

These agreements are more concerned with the establishment of bureaucratic processes and the measurement of performance with Performance Management, Performance Verification Processes, and Strategic Management Approaches being the buzzwords.

This is why our motion is before this conference. We wish for your support for the prioritisation for education and for a level of funding that will allow for basic needs to be met. Ensuring a strong and well resourced education system is purely a pragmatic decision that is necessary for economic recovery

We won’t get out of the current economic crisis on the backs of young children and we will all pay a heavy price for cutting an already under-funded education system.

Our appeal to you is to continue to support us as you did in our demonstrations around the country last autumn and winter in demanding the reversal of the counter-productive government policy of cutting education.

We must have a much more vigorous approach to government by the leadership of the ICTU to stop its targeting of children’s education. We are looking for your support to reverse this government’s approach to education because it is counter-productive – cutting education is the wrong way to fix the economic crisis facing us.

Cutting back on teacher numbers and overcrowding classrooms will not get us out of this economic crisis.

Funding for re-skilling and retraining places will.

Investing in science and technology and Information Communications Technology in schools will.

Building research capacity at third level will.

Eliminating artificial caps on education places will.

Without such measures all talk about the Smart Economy or the Knowledge economy is cheap meaningless talk.

Please Support the motion,            Thank You