Why are we still paying teachers if they won’t return to the classroom?

Why are we still funding teachers’ salaries if they won’t agree to reopen our schools? My son has additional needs and is losing out and regressing. If they won’t go back to work, surely we should just stop paying their salaries?

Your question is a common one and has been given extra validity through the voices of some teachers calling Joe Duffy to indicate their willingness to return to face-to-face teaching.

It is deeply frustrating for working parents trying to juggle overseeing online education alongside their occupational role.

It is also beyond question that children, no less than adults, are social beings and are experiencing high and growing levels of mental health challenges by being denied the opportunity to mix with their peers in school.

I’m thinking of studying in a UK university. What post-Brexit fees will I face?

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Our broadband is woeful. How can my daughter sit the online Hpat?

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My daughter isn’t studying Irish. Will she be locked out of college courses?

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My daughter is fluent in Spanish. How can she get a second-level teaching job?

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I was struck by a comment by one of our Covid-19 medical experts, who stated recently that if we all stayed apart from each other for 14 days, the virus would be gone. He then pointed out the impossibility of such a scenario, given that we all live in families and some of us have to move about to keep daily life viable.

In my mind therefore, the criteria by which to judge whether any person should leave their home would be the criteria of whether it is absolutely necessary to maintain a minimum level of societal viability.

They are working in many cases more than twice their contracted hours and would have a far more balanced quality of life if they could return to their classrooms

Looked at through this lens, then our frontline workers are absolutely vital to keep society viable.

Despite the stress it causes to families, particularly to parents who care for special needs children, face-to-face teaching is not among those services that are deemed essential to maintain the daily functioning of society.

Under current circumstances, with the virus out of control, every movement of people outside their front door adds to the spread of the virus.

As chair of a number of boards of management of schools, I see the hours that teachers are spending on preparing and delivering online teaching to their students. They are working in many cases more than twice their contracted hours and would have a far more balanced quality of life if they could return to their classrooms.

Therefore, any suggestion that their salaries be stopped because they do not want to endanger their own lives, those of their family, their school community, or those they would meet in going and coming from work, is totally unjustified.

We are in a life and death struggle with a virus that is adapting and changing constantly. Teachers are right to want to continue to work remotely from home. They are saving lives by doing so.