Joint effort needed for real productive deal with teachers

The trouble about having been a government minister is that you can see both sides of the question. I don't believe there is anyone in government, or for that matter any parent, who would not like to give their children's teachers more pay.

The same applies almost universally across the board in the public sector: nurses, junior doctors, childcare workers - all those crucial workers in the service of society. The work is difficult, the challenges enormous, the pay relatively modest.

But Mr McCreevy and his colleagues have to have an eye to the future. "Awash with money" is a phrase we hear every day. But if you give everyone in the public sector a sudden big increase, the State coffers may well be able to bear it this year, next year, maybe the year after. Then the picture begins to cloud up a bit.

One thing is certain: once given, you can't take it back. When Mr Haughey directed that there should be huge teacher pay increases more than 20 years ago, it was part of a burden which put the country into a spiral of debt and crisis which lasted until nearly 1990.

Now the secondary school teachers, the ASTI, want to depart totally from the terms of the current general increases being given across the public service.

They feel their profession has been downgraded, that their pay has fallen behind comparable graduate pay scales in the private sector, that their role in creating the well-educated Celtic Tiger cubs has not been recognised, that they have had to adapt and change to new curricula, and who could disagree with those feelings? However, the gaps in their arguments have to be filled in.

There are features about being a school teacher which have contributed to current pay scales.

These are conditions which simply do not apply to graduate employment in the private sector.

Among them are: Ireland's amazingly short school year, with its accompanying additional closures at mid-terms or for other reasons. The difficulty in removing underperforming teachers from the classroom is another.

Inflexibility in dealing with parents or management outside school hours rankles constantly.

The ban on allowing teaching performance to be properly evaluated is anomalous. Blaming ministers alone for all the ills of the system does no one any favours: do teachers not have even a tiny bit of responsibility for Ireland's woeful literacy rate? And ASTI members enjoy a security of employment which is a long-gone pipe dream for the hard-pressed parents whose children they deal with daily.

I haven't heard any sounds coming from the ASTI yet about the possibility of a real quid pro quo for the 30 per cent pay rise it seeks. Nor did I expect to hear it: negotiations won't take place in public press releases at this stage.

Individual parents have an understandable reluctance to speak out about the annoyance they feel about aspects of union intransigence. And politicians have been most reluctant to tangle with these powerful unions.

Teachers can take heart from knowing that the population in general continues to value their work and believes they should be properly paid.

Government and teachers should set about a major effort to arrive at a genuinely productive deal which would set right some of the major anomalies which have been allowed to develop (and have themselves contributed to the "downgrading" of the profession) and simultaneously would go as far as possible to meet pay aspirations.

In that way, the foundation could be laid to attract a new generation of teachers who will keep education as a central driving force of confident Ireland. In the end, that's what it's all about.

Gemma Hussey is a former minister for education and a contributor to Education Matters, an independent monthly education magazine