Where are all the primary school teachers?
There is an unprecedented shortage of primary school teachers in Ireland, according to an Irish Times article after a joint survey from the INTO, IPPN and CPSMA revealed there are over 800 teaching positions left unfilled at the moment and it’s due to get worse.
While the media are doing its best to point it at a single factor — the lack of housing options in urban areas — this issue comes as no surprise to anyone working in primary education. In fact, we’ve been banging on about it for years.
The first mention I can recall of an impending shortage of teachers was in the Education Matters journal around 2014. By 2016, schools were loudly complaining about lack of qualified teachers. The problem was acknowledged by Richard Bruton in January 2018. However, despite some sticky plaster solutions like allowing people to substitute while on career break or in a job share arrangement, the crisis has been allowed to deepen. The re-emergence of substitute panels has been too little, too late. We simply don’t have enough teachers.
Last year the government decided the best course of action was to blame teachers on career breaks. However, ultimately the numbers didn’t add up and when it turned out the Minister for Education, herself, was on a career break, the subject got dropped very quickly.
This year the finger is pointing at the housing crisis in urban areas, which the government are trying not to acknowledge, but even that isn’t the main problem because the issue is nationwide, even in rural areas.
As with most problems, it’s a little more complex than that. In my opinion, the reasons can be summed up that teaching is no longer the attractive vocational job that it once was.
One major factor is that teaching no longer offers job security. The days of a permanent job are no longer a reality for many teachers. When I finished college, I expected to get a permanent position. I don’t think I’ve advertised a permanent position in nearly a decade. Teachers now spend their getting their foot in the door of a school in a temporary position with only the hope that the job will last for more than 2 years in order to get a contract of indefinite duration. This is not based on performance, it’s solely being in the right place at the right time. Essentially the clever teacher will try and get into a growing school or a school where a teacher is on a career break for more than 2 years.
Things have changed in the workforce and teaching is now competing with much more attractive conditions. For example, most workplaces are much more flexible than they once were. Many similarly paid jobs now allow workers to work from home a number of days per week — this is much more family-friendly than teaching — a term often targeted at why teaching was a good job for a family person. Other jobs have much more flexibility in terms of working hours per week or holiday time.
Teaching also offers very little in terms of promotional rewards — not just financially but in terms of responsibility. Management positions were cut during the recession and over a decade later, there is no sign of them reappearing. There used to be incentives for further study or for working in special schools or for teaching in particular communities. All of these are gone.
Another aspect that isn’t mentioned very often is how people work these days. The Department of Education are scratching their heads because they say they train enough teachers every year. The problem is that, like every other job, many people are no longer staying in one job for their entire career. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone but it is rarely, if ever, mentioned. When I became a teacher, I expected to be in the job for 35 years. This generation doesn’t think like me. Why would this generation of teachers be any different?
In any case, some might even ask, who’d want to be a teacher? Teaching is no longer a job which is focused on education. Teachers spend their time on excessive bureaucracy, dealing with severe and often violent behavioural issues, and generally making up for the lack of services that are supposed to comes from psychologists, social workers, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, dieticians, and, dare I say, parents. One only has to look at Norma Foley’s distraction plan to support schools to help parents not buy smartphones for their own children as one of many examples.
Of all the jobs out there, I can’t name many that are so derided by the general public and the media. While I’ve spent most of my career batting off the slagging about the holidays and short days, (despite my 50+ hour working week and 2 weeks off in the summer), the level of teacher bashing in Ireland has reached desperate levels, often treated like babysitting rather than an valuable and important service; and because schools are often the only service available to families, teachers get much of the blame when things go wrong. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Education didn’t provide proper safety measures for schools and teachers, rightly, were anxious about going into small crowded spaces. Of course, teachers were lambasted. For example, when a school decides they need to shorten the school day for a pupil, rather than the Department giving the child what they need, the blame is put on the teacher for not understanding the child’s needs. If you talk to any teacher, they will tell you of a time where they spent months trying out dozens of different strategies, fighting for resources, advocating to services and losing nights of sleep worrying about a child in their class, and later to hear the child’s parent saying the school did nothing to help them. Sometimes the job can be very disheartening and it is making teachers sick.
The National Principals’ Forum have surveyed principals since 2019 and over 70% of them have reported that they have missed a significant amount of time from work due to illness as a direct result of the job. The IPPN’s job sustainability report backed this up with the principal position being twice as stressful as the norm.
Even with all of these issues, we still have lots of people that want to be teachers, and I am one of those people. I love my job. I love working with some of the most creative people I know. I love learning about education and how we can help children learn in new and innovative ways. I love the passion of teachers. I love seeing how that passion radiates in the classrooms and how children blossom and succeed. I love how teachers try out new things and take risks to get that eureka moment. I love seeing the excitement and pure joy of children learning something new, grasping a concept, getting an answer right. It’s a great job in so many ways.
I’ve been in the teaching game for over 20 years and I have worked with hundreds of teachers and I have never met a single one that didn’t care about the children they taught. However, there is no doubt that the job is becoming more and more difficult and as conditions deteriorate, as expectations become more unreasonable, as trust declines, we might end up snuffing that spark that makes Irish primary teachers want to remain in teaching. There are a lot of easier, higher paid jobs out there, with better flexibility, perks and conditions. We need to fight to keep them in the profession.
I was asked by Sarah McInerney on Drivetime what I would do if I were the Minister for Education and I wasn’t that happy with the answer I gave. I offered that we need to oversupply the system with more teachers. However, much like the reason we have a shortage of teachers, I don’t think the answer can be reduced to one solution, especially the solution I offered, although it would be one aspect.
For me, the main solution is to improve the conditions of the job. It means giving children the resources that they need. For example, Ireland has the largest class sizes in the EU and we’re one of the few countries that doesn’t have a teaching assistant position. For example, we have a huge rise in additional educational needs in classrooms so we simply need our children to get the supports they require. Instead, schools are given skeletal supports and told to prioritise to the greatest need. I could go on. The one thing we can’t afford to do is exactly what the government has been doing since 2014 when the issue of teacher shortages was first raised — and that’s to do nothing. However, unfortunately, I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
