Breda O’Brien: School hiring rules need to be reformed to make it easier to find substitute teachers

Maintaining the integrity of the teaching profession and the right of every student to receive a full education are core values for most educationalists. It is with some astonishment, therefore, that I find myself advocating something once unthinkable. Can we please reform the five-day rule?

Unless you live in a particularly distant section of the metaverse, you will have heard about the crisis in sourcing substitute and indeed, permanent teachers.

For example, in advance of a Joint Oireachtas Education Committee meeting in October, Cork Fianna Fáil TD Pádraig O’Sullivan contacted the post-primary school where he used to work.

He discovered that of 83 staff, 27 were absent, with nine out due to Covid-19. Management in that the school spends two to three hours a day trying to locate substitutes, time that should be spent running the school and, in particular, leading teaching and learning.

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This was an unusually high number but unfortunately, far from a unique situation. Virtually every school has recruitment problems, and inevitably, this leads to using unqualified teachers.

Using Freedom of Information, Newstalk established that in the last year, 5,145 unregistered individuals worked 91,845 days as substitutes in secondary schools alone.

The recruitment crisis is causing unbearable strain. Students are unsettled and anxious, particularly those with additional needs

Enter the five-day rule. A teacher who is not registered with the Teaching Council cannot be paid with public funds. An unregistered teacher can only work five days in a row and is not paid on the sixth day. So if he or she works Monday to Friday this week, they cannot be paid for the following Monday. If they are re-employed on Tuesday, the measure rolls from week to week, meaning that it is virtually impossible to employ an unqualified teacher without significant administrative headaches.

This measure was implemented when there were far too many unqualified teachers employed and a lot of young teachers could not find jobs as a result. In short, it arose in completely different times, when there was a surplus of qualified teachers.

Source of frustration

Today, in certain subjects such as modern foreign languages, physics and home economics, schools often advertise positions and receive not a single application. The five-day rule was designed to prevent people from building up employment entitlements, leading to a situation where an unregistered person could have a right to be kept on in a role even when a fully qualified teacher became available.

Currently, this is a source of frustration as while every school would prefer to employ qualified people only, if it is a choice between a reasonably competent but untrained individual, or having no teacher at all, what are schools to do?

The recruitment crisis is causing unbearable strain. Students are unsettled and anxious, particularly those with additional needs. And as Paul Crone of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals said recently, principals are reporting that teachers are also exhausted from going above and beyond what is expected of them to meet the needs of students.

There are safeguards in place regarding unqualified teachers. Schools have to be able to show that they have tried every possible route to secure a qualified teacher. Unqualified teachers have to be Garda vetted like everyone else. Their contracts state that their positions are only available until a suitably qualified teacher is found.

The two-year postgraduate master’s degree in education (PME) at second level needs serious reform, for starters. It now costs between €12,000 to €15,000, leading to immense financial strain

Students deserve fully qualified teachers. But these are unprecedented times. The Joint Managerial Body for secondary schools (JMB) advocated in 2018 that the five-day rule should become a 30-day rule. It achieves the same aim of preventing unqualified teachers from building up entitlements that block qualified teachers from getting jobs but ends the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to manage the five-day rule.

The Department of Education has instituted several welcome, if belated and piecemeal measures, including allowing third- and fourth-year teacher-training students to register with the Teaching Council, thus avoiding the five-day rule. This will afford some small but welcome relief to primary schools in particular when these students finish their placements and become available to sub.

The department now also allows qualified teachers to work up to 20 hours a term beyond their allocated hours and has relaxed regulations for job sharers. None of these measures will solve the crisis. Reform of the five-day rule is just a stopgap measure, too.

Structural change

Structural, permanent change is needed. The two-year postgraduate master’s degree in education (PME) at second level needs serious reform, for starters. It now costs between €12,000 to €15,000, leading to immense financial strain. Dr Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin and Dr Thomas Delahunty have advocated fully funded scholarships for excellent PME candidates. Although a good idea, more is needed.

The second year of the PME should be funded for everyone and should be spent entirely in schools. Second-year PME students should be paid at the unqualified rate for the hours they work as part of their training, with the option to work more than the prescribed PME hours.

The current scandalous two-tier pay system for teachers in place since 2011 must end. New opportunities for professional advancement must be opened up. Housing remains a crucial barrier to retention. Nonetheless, the measures outlined here would go some way toward attracting and retaining fully qualified teachers. This would eventually make the five-day (or 30-day) rule redundant, to no one’s sorrow.