Sir, – It’s unfortunate that Brian Mooney managed to make the teacher recruitment and retention crisis sound complex (“Why are so many of my daughter’s teachers changing all the time?”, Education, November 29th).
The reasons are indeed, as he states, various but the overriding issue is pay, the very factor he fails to mentions.
He states that the crisis is partly caused by the “predominantly female . . . demographic profile” of teachers which “means many who enter the profession alternate periods of teaching with child-rearing during their teaching careers”.
Maternity leave is not the problem. The fact that a teacher cannot be replaced is. – Yours, etc,
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SEAN KEAVNEY,
Castleknock,
Dublin 15.
