Sir, – The article “Spending on education low but teachers’ salaries high”, Home News, July 11th) could be misinterpreted by some as suggesting that classroom teachers enjoy huge salaries.
There remains a misconception that all teachers are employed on full-time permanent contracts of employment and have complete security of tenure. In reality, a conservative estimate would be that 25 per cent to 30 per cent of teachers are on part-time contracts, many of these on less than full hours.
For those entering the teaching profession after a training period of five years, it now takes an average of a further five years for a new teacher to secure a level of permanency. Even then, this is often on small numbers of hours that see them earning much less than the average industrial wage.
Up to this they typically work on short-term contracts of low “part-time” hours covering for those teachers on leave of absence with no guarantee that they will be retained by their school in the following year. Like too many others in our society, their struggle to meet basic financial commitments is a very real one.
With respect to the teachers on the higher salaries referred to in your article, these are principals with responsibility for large schools with significant numbers of students and staff. Any principal earning €100,000 has responsibility for a very large school of 700 students or more. It should also be noted that schools have lost 6,000 middle management positions as a result of the public service moratorium and this has added significantly to the workload of principal teachers.
All teachers, including principals, have suffered cuts of up to 20 per cent on their take home pay in recent years, while those appointed from 2011 onwards have been hit with a further 14 per cent cut in salary. – Yours, etc,