An insider's guide to education
Here is the future of teaching in this State - if certain key figures in education have their way.
Broadly, teachers would work harder and longer with more accountability and uncomplicated new procedures to weed out those who are underperforming.
Here's the deal. Under a new model, all in-service training days, oral exams and so on would be taken during an expanded school year. The golden era of very long summer holidays for teachers would end. Parents would no longer be forced to endure those seriously inconvenient "training days" when schools shut down with little advance notice.
In return, teachers would get a bagful of extra money and some additional allowances.
That, at least, is the future favoured by some key figures.
It will not happen on Mary Hanafin's watch, so close to an election. But watch this space, the pressure to enforce this kind of radical change is building behind the scenes.
• More on Daltun Ó Ceallaigh, the low-profile general secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) who retires shortly. Ó Ceallaigh was on the executive of the Civil Rights Association in the North during the turbulent period from 1969 to 1971.
He is the author of several books on nationalism and much else and is credited by Gerry Adams (right), no less, as a major influence for his book The New Ireland.
• Old tensions between the INTO and the Irish Primary Principals' Network (IPPN) resurfaced last week. The INTO sees the relatively new grouping as an interloper on its patch. But the IPPN say the INTO is not sufficiently focused on the plight of principals.
Tensions have been exacerbated by a recent meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Education where Senator Joe O'Toole, ex general secretary of the INTO, took the wind from IPPN sails, as it were.
The IPPN has been demanding new administrative and management layers to allow principals focus on teaching. Bad idea said O'Toole. With his customary penchant for classic one-liners, O'Toole said this would have teachers standing over a chasm and looking down!
O'Toole maintains the new layers of bureaucracy would undermine principals and play to a Department of Finance agenda. But the IPPN accuses O'Toole of raining on its parade.
• Many thanks to all of those who dished the dirt in 2006. Teachers' Pet will return in the New Year.
Got any education gossip? E-mail us, in confidence, at teacherspet@irish-times.ie
