Teaching Matters: There has been a warm welcome for Mary Hanafin as the new Minister for Education and Science from the secondary sector, albeit a welcome tinged with caution.
Many people thought Noel Dempsey was a promising minister, too, when he was appointed. Remember how we thought a former career guidance counsellor would have a particular insight into the needs of students, parents and teachers? However, as teenagers say: "Let's not go there." It's too painful. Let's look instead to the future. No doubt our new Minister has been besieged with suggestions. Here are some wishes from the ground in the secondary sector.
Wish one: Minister, please, please, please help us to help those who are most in need. There was a laudable policy of trying to mainstream children with special needs. What was far from laudable was the fact that mainstreaming happened without adequate or, in some cases, any support. These students desperately need more help, especially in the form of qualified resource teachers and special needs assistants. Some parents have the ability to research and find what will help their children, and are also able to pay for that help. But what about the parents who can do neither? Help for such children should be a right, not something for which parents and schools have to beg. There is a whole category of children who just need that little bit of extra attention and care, but who will rarely receive it from a hard-pressed teacher who has 29 or 30 other students to look after. There is yet another group who are temporarily shell-shocked by some crisis or other in their family lives, perhaps a messy separation or the death of a close relative. The ratio of guidance counsellors to pupils needs to be revised to take account of these realities.
Wish two: By the end of your tenure, would it not be wonderful if every child were well on the way to receiving an education in a school which is warm, bright, dry, spacious, with adequate sanitation and free of vermin? This aim may appear rather minimalist, but as you well know, Minister, many schools are far from reaching it. Certainly, improve the level of information technology in schools, but many would settle for roofs which do not leak, or having enough toilets.
Wish three: Minister, tread cautiously when it comes to reform of the Leaving Cert. The problems of the old system are obvious, and well-rehearsed. It measures a narrow range of intelligence, gives an unfair advantage to the skilled crammer with a good memory, and imposes an inhuman level of stress on many students. Yet it is possible that a new system, unless it is well-thought out in conjunction with students, parents and teachers, could be even more flawed. I have yet to meet a student who liked the thought of his or her teacher being the one to assess him or her for educational certification. Students see very clearly that it alters irrevocably the relationship between student and teacher. The current Leaving Cert is objective, because the examiner does not know the student, and it is indisputably all the student's own work. At third level, I have heard parents claim their son or daughter has not submitted one original essay. It would be awful if plagiarised work were allowed to become the plague of second-level, too. Yet, don't err entirely on the side of caution. Change must come, but it must be intelligent change.
Wish four: Kill off, once and for all, the notion of introducing to Ireland the kind of league tables which have severely damaged British education. How ironic it would be, to seek to reform the points system for students, and then replace it with a points system for schools. For example, how do you measure in a league table the fact that in some schools the majority of parents are ambitious, middle-class people, who push their children to succeed in education? Or the fact that five passes in a Junior Cert may rank as a first-class miracle for some students?
Wish five: Reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. Fewer pupils per teacher means more individual attention, less discipline problems, more innovative teaching and less teacher burn-out. Only miserliness stands in the way of a dramatic and simple improvement in the Irish second-level education system.
Wish six: Pay the part-timers the back money that is owed to them. End the widespread exploitation of young teachers involved in using part-time teachers who have little prospect of gaining a permanent post.
Make teaching once again a job with some prospect of security. Otherwise, you will lose a lot of good people who just can't cope with the uncertainty of not knowing where they will be from one academic year to another.
Wish seven: Treat teachers like human beings. No more pre-Christmas inspections. Instead, concentrate on teacher-friendly development and training geared to helping them improve their skills to meet the increasingly complex challenge of teaching this generation.
Finally, Minister, if you treat us with anything approaching the respect normally due to professionals, we will be so unused to it that you may well become the most popular minister for education in decades. All for simply doing what should have been the norm, anyway. An enticing prospect, is it not?
Breda O'Brien is an Irish Times columnist and a teacher at Dominican Convent, Muckross Park, Dublin.
