The primary teachers' union leader, Senator Joe O'Toole, has warned that primary schools throughout the State will lose nearly 400 teachers when they reopen next month. He threatened industrial action at those schools worst affected.
The INTO general secretary said the Department of Education's failure to increase the number of teachers "will result in extra pressure and larger classes in the schools affected."
"Over the past few months the number of school boards of management writing to the INTO to express their frustration at poor staffing arrangements has reached record levels," he said. "We intend balloting for industrial action in those schools which will be most seriously affected by staffing shortages."
Senator O'Toole gave examples of a school in Convoy, Co Donegal, which will be teaching groups of 34 in multi-class situations; an inner-city Dublin school, part of the "Breaking the Cycle" initiative, which will lose a teacher despite up to 50 per cent of its junior infant class coming from refugee and asylum-seeking families; and a school in Dundalk which will have 38 pupils in third and fourth class after losing a teacher.
Senator O'Toole said the State remained "at the bottom of the OECD pile" as regards the primary pupil-teacher ratio, with only Turkey, Mexico and Korea in a worse position.
The INTO is known to be concerned that the demographic figures on which the Department of Education bases its planning are faulty. In a briefing paper to school board chairmen and women in June, the union said "the underlying trend is for an increase in the enrolment figures in primary schools", even if the net decrease in pupil numbers continues for a few more years.
The union believes that, at a conservative estimate, an increasing birth rate will require about 180 extra teachers per year up to 2000; an unplanned-for immigration rate will require 160 extra teachers per year; and teacher retirements another 400 per year.
It says this comes to a total which is 100 per year more than the annual output from teacher training colleges.
A Department of Education spokesman responded angrily. "Once again the INTO is misleading the public about staffing levels in schools," he said. Some 600 teachers lost their posts and were reallocated to other jobs last year without any complaint from the union.
"The important thing is that not a single teacher has lost his or her job in recent years because of the `demographic dividend'," said the spokesman. This reallocates teachers from schools with falling pupil numbers to those with rising numbers, to one-teacher schools and to special programmes such as resource and remedial teaching.
He said this was the only major requirement insisted on by the INTO this year, and the Minister for Education had negotiated it with the Minister for Finance.
He said there was an agreement between the INTO and the Government that each school year's staffing level should be based on the previous September's pupil enrolment. "Thus, for example, if a school had 100 pupils last September, its staff this September would be based on that figure, even if enrolments had fallen in the meantime."
If enrolments had risen in that time, and class sizes had gone over the maximum permitted size, the Department would examine each school's case, said the spokesman.