Budget 2009: 1,000 Teaching Jobs To Go 15/10/08

Statement by Declan Kelleher, INTO President, on Budget 2009

15th October 2008

Up to 1,000 teacher jobs to go in Budget cutback

The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation has said that up to a thousand teaching jobs will be lost next year as a result of yesterday’s budget. 

The effect of increasing class sizes will mean that up to three hundred schools will either lose a teacher or be unable to appoint a teacher next year. Up to five hundred English language teaching posts will be lost by the imposition of a cap on these posts in schools. Two hundred jobs will go in disadvantaged schools, hitting the most marginalised schools in the country.

“This makes a complete mockery of government promises not to attack front line staff,” said INTO President, Declan Kelleher. “This decision is a direct assault on primary pupils and their parents and will mean far bigger classes and fewer teachers to teach children with English language needs. It hits the most vulnerable and most in need pupils in the system.”

The INTO said that as a result of this decision, hundreds of teachers expected to graduate from Colleges of Education will be unemployed. “We will see highly qualified, motivated and enthusiastic teachers joining dole queues instead of going into classrooms where they are needed,” said Kelleher. He described this decision as one of the most regressive in years, returning Ireland to the 1980s when class sizes were last increased.

“In 1987, Mary O'Rourke, the then Minister for Education increased class sizes in primary schools. It took twenty years for the school system to recover and make some small progress. Now the Finance Minister, a nephew of Ms O'Rourke, has followed in her footsteps and put primary class sizes back years.”

Mr Kelleher said primary education had got little out of the boom years. He said the least parents and teachers expected was that primary schools would be spared the worst of the cuts. “This is not the case,” he said. “Attacks on services to small children are the price to be paid for bailing out banks and builders.”  

“I want to know how Fianna Fail TDs can justify this attack to parents who will be incensed. I want to know how Green Party TDs will explain this when they promised the exact opposite to parents and teachers. I want to know how some Independent TDs who know the effect of large class sizes will square their support of this flawed decision with statements made at election time.”

ENDS