Education: it's beyond productivity deals

He's a lone figure jogging around Bushy Park in Rathfarnham, Dublin. As the darkening evening moves in, Joe Carolan's stamina shows no sign of flagging. He carries on steady as a metronome, the years of playing senior county football for Longford and Westmeath paying off.

As incoming president of the TUI, he will need a high level of fitness over the next two years to fight the good fight on behalf of his members. He has promised the 11,000 members to keep his finger on their collective pulse and to deliver on a range of issues.

Top of the list is a settlement on salary rises for teachers under the Partnership 2000 agreement. "All pay agreements have to be linked to productivity," he explains. The problem for teachers at second-level and third-level is how their productivity can to be measured.

"Teachers are co-operating with a whole raft of new courses and programmes," says Carolan. "There's a huge amount of voluntary co-operation in schools but if the Department insists and continues to demand productivity be linked to salary increases, they will stop.

"It's totally counter-productive. The Department is not recognising all the voluntary work which goes on in schools, which it says has to be measured. Teachers don't get the salary increases . . . if they don't give productivity and it's measured by saying you'll work so many extra hours a year." Education, he insists, can't be added up "like some crude productivity measurement."

Carolan is currently involved in urgent negotiations to secure additional teaching resources for schools following the appointment of over 350 assistant principals around the country and the attendant loss of four teaching hours per appointment.

On a less urgent footing, his shopping list has representation for TUI members on all the boards of management and vocational education committees. He points out that the minister is moving in that direction but "we want teacher and parent representation on VECs and comprehensive school boards". Although the minister has said that he will bring in legislation to deal with this, "I will be making sure that he does", says Carolan.

"A lot of industrial disputes in education have taken place because teachers are not represented on the boards. We want to be there by right."

He also wants the Minister to implement the recommendations of the Murray Report which would reduce the number of politicians on these committees. The report recommends a maximum of seven politicians on a VEC line-up. Some VECs have up to eight public representatives with the rest of the membership proposed by the county council.

Carolan also wants the minister to bring forward legislation to give vocational teachers access to the industrial relations mechanism of the State. "At the moment we are precluded from access to the Labour Court or the Labour Relations Commission," he says. "It's all ad-hocery at the moment, sometimes the Department gets involved. Most of those disputes could be resolved if you could refer them to third-party mediation."

The exploitation of part-time teachers is another issue which Carolan wants to address. "We've had success in trying to remedy the casualisation of second-level and third-level teachers under the PCW. Hundreds of our members have had their teaching posts converted to permanent posts but there's still a lot of exploitation of part-time teachers."

The TUI, he says, will insist that the ITs implement in full the terms of the PCW agreement. The union will resist "any deviation by management from the letter of the agreement. We'll fight it case by case if necessary. We'd prefer if management would collectively work out a resolution to this problem. It's simply gross exploitation of part-time teachers."

Some lecturers are being kept on seven hours a week, he says. It appears that the employers "want to keep them from the eight-hour threshold so that they won't be covered by the 1991 Act that covers part-time workers."

During the year the TUI succeeded in securing permanent posts for teachers in Traveller centres. The union is currently in arbitration over a claim that members working on Youth Reach schemes be recognised as teachers.

"It's a strength of the TUI that we are so disparate and diverse", representing teachers in VEC schools, community and comprehensive schools, ITs, the prison service, adult education centres, Youth Reach schemes, Traveller centres, VTOS, plcs and a number of people in UL.

Carolan, who is likely to return to being a teacher of business studies and accounting at Coola Vocational School in Co Sligo when his term of office is up, has been a TUI member since 1979. He has been a member of the executive committee for nine years. He has also been acting assistant general secretary of the TUI.

In that time he has seen some improvements in the whole VEC sector. "We've managed to depoliticise appointments in the VECs," he says. "It's part of the PCW agreement and it's one of the great steps forward. We find that the new boards are working much better.

"The problem we have - and we are addressing it with management - is that we are insisting on gender balance on boards. In 1998 a woman going before an all-male board is unacceptable and there is stipulation for gender balance. We don't accept any board where there's no gender balance. We have succeeded in having interview boards re-constituted with a new board."

Carolan believes that the greatest single issue facing teachers and lecturers is the challenge to defend and improve conditions of service of every TUI member.

"We have developed PLCs and pioneered the growth of PLC courses. And we know that the Taoiseach and the Minister for Education recognise the contribution that the PLCs have made to the economy and they are prepared to put resources into the area. We do need more resources. PLCs are here to stay."

He believes they need to be developed in "a coherent and rational way . . . it's an area that is going to grow, particularly with 23,000 students in the sector"

Sitting at his desk in TUI headquarters in Rathgar, Dublin, the queries come in a steady flow every day from branch representatives and individual members throughout the country. There are plenty of issues to be dealt with. And so, while Carolan is based in Dublin far from Sligo's bracing air, he will head out for his daily run in Bushy Park. We'll leave him, jogging through the dampening air and the wish list of TUI members