There's a chaotic year ahead for our schools

BRIAN MOONEY'S ADVICE CENTRE:THE COMBINATION of the Government's budgetary decisions and the expected introduction of the taxation of lump sum payments has led to a huge increase in the number of teachers seeking retirement. To be eligible, teachers aged 55 and over must have completed 33 years' service.

That there is a rush to get out of teaching is not surprising. When schools re-open in September they will be very different places. If a school is currently over the quota for teacher:pupils ratios, the teachers retiring this month will not be replaced. The teaching unions say more than 1,000 jobs could go at both primary and second level. This will put huge pressures on principals as they attempt to maintain the range of subjects on offer in their school. As many of these principals are eligible to retire themselves, they may not find the prospect of crisis management very attractive. We may therefore also find boards of management scrambling to appoint many new principals during the summer.

The embargo on appointments to promotional posts will also generate huge problems. Assistant principal posts and duties cannot be advertised or filled. In most schools, assistant principals carry out the middle-management functions of year heads, are programme co-ordinators for Transition Year, Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme, Leaving Certificate Applied, sports co-ordinators and so on. If appointments to any or a number of these duties cannot take place, when schools reopen in September, the day-to-day running of schools may become impossible.

The schools that will be hit hardest by these retirements will be those in the fee-paying sector. These schools suffered the largest cut in their resources in the December budget announcement. They are now being caught in a pincer movement. Parents of many students are suffering financial hardship and may be under pressure to pay fees. Meanwhile, these schools may lose the additional teachers and a range extras which made them so attractive to parents in the first place.

But every cloud has a silver lining. The departure of large numbers of teachers should create employment opportunities for young teachers who are currently holding down part-time teaching posts. It will also create unanticipated opportunities for this year’s graduates from teacher-training colleges and the Higher Diploma in Education programmes.

From the Minister for Finance’s perspective, this large outflow of teachers will be both a curse and a blessing. He will see a major reduction in salary costs as over-the-quota posts are eliminated from the system, and promotional posts worth more than €8000 are not replaced. The negative side of the equation is that he will now face the prospect of borrowing tens of millions of euro, to pay out lump sum amounts of over €100,000 to every teacher who chooses to retire .

TALK BACK ...

It is clear that wage costs throughout the economy in both the public and private sectors – particularly at management levels – are way out of line with our EU colleagues.

Some months ago, I suggested a ceiling of €100,000 on the salary of any public servant, be they Government Minister or hospital consultant, with pro-rata reductions further down the scale. By pretending not to cut pay through the use of so-called pension and other levies, the Government is making it enormously attractive for public servants who at the peak of their productivity in their mid-50s to retire at huge cost to the public purse.

If they had the courage to announce an immediate cut in their own salary scales to the €100,000 ceiling, instead of setting up a benchmarking review, they could then have initiated a cut in salaries at the higher pay levels within the public sector.

The effect of such a bold and courageous step would have been to remove the huge financial incentive to the over-55s to retire. The Government would not then have had to suspend appointments to vital promotional posts throughout the public service, including those in schools.

There would have been a real sense of grievance among those over 55 that the retirement package they had anticipated was now going to be dramatically cut. But, in the light of the decimation of many private sector pension funds, such grievance would be very short-lived.

Unfortunately, this Government is showing a complete lack of the political nerve to take the decisions necessary to rectify our present precarious economic situation. In failing to do so, it is setting our schools up for a chaotic year ahead.

Brian Mooney is a guidance counsellor at Oatlands College, Dublin