Teachers, parents face winter of discontent

This week one of those letters every parent dreads landed in the hall. Keep your child at home, the local school is closing.

Groan.

However, unlike school closures for staff meetings, sports days, staff training or parent-teacher meetings, this letter was different. Your school is closing for at least seven days, maybe longer in the new year, it said.

Extended groan.

While the figures are imprecise, up to 750,000 parents could have children at home next week when the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI) takes to the streets. That is a lot of anxious phone calls home to check on the kids.

As the teachers and the Government sparred ahead of Tuesday's big showdown, parents were keeping a low profile. However, even the small amount of calls to radio phone-in shows this week indicated many of them will feel hassled and overwrought by the end of next week.

Nowadays many homes have

two working parents. Many of them want their local school to provide high-minded education tailored for the new millennium, but they will also admit in their quieter moments that school is a pretty good baby-sitting service.

Your children are out of the home for most of the day and they learn something. Take such a valuable service away and a lot of parents get agitated. While teachers talk of years of neglect at the hands of a mean-spirited paymaster and the Government talks about pulling back from the brink, all sides know that parents are the key constituency to appeal to.

Both of them have been careful to step around this sleeping giant in recent days. One misplaced step, faux pas or gaffe could wake the monster from its slumber and their careful strategies will be ruined.

Teachers deal with parents every day and know how uneasy that relationship can become. Consequently, they have been careful to play to this important gallery.

Several months ago, ASTI launched an impressive television advertising campaign, which sought to show parents how much their children benefited from contact with their teacher, particularly outside school hours.

In the advertisements, teachers were shown as counsellors and confidants to perturbed teenagers. The message was clear. Surely a reasonable price could be put on the extra work - social and personal - which teachers rendered every day.

The feedback from the advertisement was positive, probably because it was a refreshing change of tone, with teachers accentuating the positive over the negative.

Teachers, including the ASTI general secretary Charlie Lennon (a parent himself), have been busily looking to shore up support for their industrial action for months among parents. They point out that dispirited and devalued teachers are not good for pupils either. As one teacher said this week: "Parents are the people who above all should be supporting us."

The Government has also been on a charm offensive. The Minister for Education, Dr Woods, says he will pay parents (by funding boards of managements) for supervising children during the industrial action. Presented as an exercise in parental empowerment, school managers were yesterday dismissing it as a badly thought out stunt.

Nevertheless, the Government does not want to find itself in the way of parents who want to roll up their sleeves and enter the schoolyard, but there is little chance of school principals being trampled underfoot in the rush. Who really is prepared to supervise secondary school pupils in crowded corridors and chaotic schoolyards for a few pounds an hour?

With both sides posing as the parents' choice, it is hard to judge what people are thinking. However an Irish Times/Market Research Bureau of Ireland poll in April found the public delicately balanced on the issue of a 30 per cent pay rise for teachers - 46 per cent for, 45 per cent against.

Behind the headline figure, things were even more interesting. Some 52 per cent of women supported the teachers, compared to 41 per cent of men. Dubliners were more likely to champion the teachers' cause than rural respondents.

Somewhat reassuring for ASTI was that 53 per cent of those between 18 and 24 supported its claim. Middle-aged people were more circumspect.

TEACHERS were surprised at the results. Accustomed to regular baitings on the national airwaves, they expected only a tiny pool of support. Since April, ASTI has been seeking to hold on to it, but the use of its heavy artillery - school closures - could dilute public approval.

Many parents may support a teachers' pay claim this weekend, but ask the question again when their son or daughter falls behind in their Leaving Cert studies and expect a different reply.

ASTI has firmly ruled out an exemption for those taking exams. This could be a costly hostage to fortune. In emotional and populist terms, exam students are likely to play the symbolic role patients played in the nurses' dispute. They will rapidly become the invisible victims of the strike, pulling on the State's collective heart strings.

The pathos created by images of overburdened, bleary-eyed exam students hopelessly trying to catch up on their algebra and English poetry in the depths of winter could bring down ASTI's project.

The challenge for teachers is that the sheer scale of their industrial action (classes will be cancelled for at least eight days before Christmas) is going to test even the most unwavering supporter. Parents who remain loyal through the holiday season may not be able to go further down the road with ASTI if it withdraws from the exams in February.

Everyone hopes such possibilities will not have to be considered. Teachers tend to split into two groups on this. One view is that to get a pay rise from a parsimonious Government does not come without some pain - for teachers, parents and pupils.

One teachers' leader summed up the "can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" viewpoint this week: "There is no point in shirking from the reality that people are going to suffer; anyone who tries to think you get free money from the Government is living in a fool's paradise".

However, another teacher struck a different note. "Nobody wants to upset exam students and their parents and most teachers are hoping it will not be necessary. The whole thing could go off the rails if parents start agitating against us."

This kind of prediction would see parents turn on ASTI in a vengeful rage and make it back down and accept some kind of tepid compromise.

But equally, pushing the nuclear button on exams could have the opposite effect, with desperate parents telling the Government to end the dispute at whatever cost.

It is going to be a long winter.

eoliver@irish-times.ie