This article is from page 14 of the 2012-07-03 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 14 JPG
A FORMER St Flannan’s College teacher, who was last week named as the Irish Secondary School Teacher of Year, has spoken out against the Government’s treatment of young teachers.
Newly-crowned teacher of the year, Evelyn O’Connor, has been contracted on a year-to-year basis since she left St Flannan’s in 2010. She believes that the Government is failing young teachers and students by the way they are managing the cutbacks in the education budget.
Currently, in Clare, one in every four Clare-based teachers are on temporary contracts from the Department of Education.
“Ultimately, this is very bad for students. I am worried about myself and my students. Continuity is so important in education. If a student has a teacher that they work well with, they need to know that that teacher will be there the next year and the year after that,” said Evelyn.
“The Government are pretending that they haven’t cut the student/teacher ratio but that is just not true.”
According to Evelyn, the popular preconceptions held by the majority about teachers are not true.
“I think the perception is different from the reality. The Government are trying to turn teaching into a part-time job and they are avoiding, whenever they can, giving any teacher a full-time jobs now. Instead, they issue teachers with fixed-term contracts with so few hours a week that they can never hope to be made permanent.
“These teachers then have to look for other jobs just to make ends meet and a lot just end up leaving the profession. Students ask me more and more, ‘Will we have you next year Miss?’, and I don’t know what to tell them. Because I don’t know.”
Evelyn also hit out against redeployment in the education system, which she says has created an atmosphere within staff rooms where teachers are afraid to speak up for fear of being redeployed by the management.