In a wide ranging address today, TUI general secretary Peter MacMenamin re-iterated the union’s stance on the Croke Park Agreement. He highlighted that teachers and students suffering due to cutbacks and ridiculed any suggestion that the output provided by teachers and lecturers in the education service is ‘not fit for purpose.’
Some key issues addressed:
Future of Croke Park Agreement
In the event of there being any departure by Government from the terms of this agreement, any citing of the clause relating to “unforeseen economic circumstances”, any weakening of the commitments not to cut pay or to make members redundant, then all bets are off. It is on these conditions that TUI has accepted the Public Service Agreement. If these conditions are breached then we as a union absolutely reserve the right to withdraw from all commitments given. We also reserve the right to consider and ballot for a resumption of industrial action up to and including strike action.
‘Jury out’ on new Government
It remains an open question whether in selecting the Government that we have selected the people of our country have made a wise choice or whether they have taken the view that anybody was better than the previous Government. Such a view might be a very short-sighted view. However, let us wait and let us judge. We the jury are still out. We will have the first opportunity as a Congress to judge when our new Minister for Education and Skills addresses us tomorrow. One of the optimistic notes in respect of our new Minister is his immediate recognition that our education system is not, what has been said on many occasions in the past, a world class education system for all. It is an education system that is allowing too many people to slip through the cracks, too many people to leave school with significant literacy and numeracy problems. It is an education system that is suffering from the neglect of decades and that neglect is in the main a financial neglect. There has never been adequate investment in education. The remarkable success in Irish education have been despite rather than because of adequate investment, meanwhile the funding of privilege continues.
Teachers and students suffering due to cutbacks
The cause is not of our making but we suffer the effects. We suffer the effects of reductions in our pay and pensions, curtailment of our ability to do the job that we want to do. In many cases, poverty in the classroom is not just poverty of the student but it is poverty also of some of our members, brought about by the appalling misdeeds of those in authority – both in banks and in Government.
Education is a human right
Education is a human right. I have referred previously to its enshrinement in the universal declaration of human rights. Regrettably, this has no place in the balance sheet of Ireland’s financiers. To convince the financiers and economists one has to have an argument with numbers, euro signs or more frequently dollar signs. We therefore argue that investment in education is necessary to have a well-educated workforce and that economic development is contingent on a well-educated workforce. We have been backed up in this argument by many industrialists and indeed at a conference some time ago, organised by TUI, we shared a platform with none other than IBEC making the same argument.
30,000 extra training places must be provided by proven providers
I welcome the commitment in the Program for Government to provide 30,000 additional training places to be delivered across the education and training system in line with the recommendations of the Expert Group on Future
Skills Needs. We for our part must ensure that as a union our policies are such as to ensure that a maximum number of these places go to the public sector, the only publically accountable sector, the one with the track record of quality and of delivery, the one that is fit for purpose and not to the private “for profit” operators that are proliferating and growing, with profit and not the welfare of students as their motivating force. We have the expertise and the teachers to do this and to grow this sector and we must put no obstacles in the way of achieving this goal, both in the national interest and in the interest of our current and future members.
If education system not fit for purpose, what is?
On the subject of fit for purpose, might I in passing utterly reject the statement made by the Minister for the Public Service insofar as it relates to teachers and lecturers, the statement that the public service is not fit for purpose. The Institute of Technology sector stated at an Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education that with diminishing resources it took in excess of an extra 5,500 students last year. If this is not fit for purpose, what is? Our Further Education Colleges, with an artificially imposed cap on the allocation of resources, are taking of the order of 7,000 students for which they are receiving no funding or resources. If this is not fit for purpose, what is? Our second level schools, stripped of resources, starved of investment, with a building programme which cannot even spend the money allocated to it within the year, still manages to put through ever increasing numbers of students to an ever higher level of participation. If this is not fit for purpose, what is?
Third level lecturer hours far beyond international norms
The international norms of timetabled teaching at higher education is somewhere between 10 and 12 hours per week. The 16 hours that is prescribed for Lecturers and the 18 for Assistant Lecturers dates from a time when our colleges, in the main, covered apprentice courses along with Certificate and in some cases Diploma courses and for that level of work this might be an appropriate weekly demand. For Higher Education Institutes which are regularly undertaking work at levels 8, 9 and 10, where virtually every member is engaged in that, the direction of the movement of the weekly demand should have been downward in order to protect the quality of work of our members. I greatly fear, and I know that members in our colleges greatly fear, that the imposition of the additional two hours, which is available to managements, will damage quality. In putting into place this provision to increase hours we must as far as we can protect the hours of our fixed term contract members. The purpose of this proposal to increase lecturers’ hours is not to curtail the work of fixed term members but to increase throughput. That’s what it says and we must ensure that that is what it delivers.