TUI:Some schools were creating a "social apartheid" by refusing to take on students with educational or behavioural difficulties, the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) president Tim O'Meara said yesterday.
During a hard-hitting address which was greeted with a standing ovation by the 400 TUI delegates at the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran, Co Donegal, Mr O'Meara condemned a practice which he said leads to some schools choosing not to enrol pupils with learning difficulties.
"We unreservedly condemn the practice of some schools who connive not to enrol children with special educational needs and in fact make a virtue of the fact that they enrol very few, if any," he said.
Mr O'Meara said that the union was "angry and disappointed" that the Department of Education and the National Council for Special Education had not addressed "the failure of these schools to apply public policy on inclusion".
He continued: "TUI has called for sanctions on schools - including the progressive withdrawal of State funding - which avoid their duties by contriving to prevent students with special needs or challenging behaviour from enrolling. TUI condemns this social apartheid."
Mr O'Meara also criticised the lack of action on providing school psychologists to assess special-needs students, saying that a child who could not pay for private assessment was left waiting for months for the service.
He condemned the investment levels in education and said that Ireland spent about €1,000 less per student than the average spent in the original 15 EU countries, and €2,000 per student less than in Denmark.
Mr O'Meara declared that the TUI was unhappy with the way productivity-linked pay agreements were organised.
"The current view out there is that workers should do more for basic cost-of-living pay increases. The Teachers' Union of Ireland does not subscribe to that view," he said.
Towards 2016 was not a good agreement and the TUI had taken the "lesser worst option" open to it, he said. "The consequences of not accepting the agreement was that the pay increase would not be paid to TUI members . . . To have stayed outside the agreement would have allowed other unions to negotiate on vital areas at second level.
"TUI believes that it is wrong that other unions vote on our conditions of service. Regrettably, this view is currently a minority view within the Ictu."
Mr O'Meara signalled his support for the INO and the PNAI and said that if local bargaining clauses were included in pay agreements, recent problems might not have arisen.
He also said that they needed "less talk from the Minister" and more action on reducing class sizes.
Earlier, general secretary Jim Dorney said that the TUI had only accepted the terms of the Towards 2016 agreement because there was "no viable alternative" to securing the pay increases or negotiating on the modernisation proposals associated with the agreement.