Vol. 419 No. 7
7 Mr. Gilmore asked the Minister for Education if he will outline (1) the plans he has to introduce a welfare service for teachers (2) the remit of the service and (3) the number of welfare officers to be appointed; and if he will make a statement on the matter.
A proposal for the establishment of a welfare service for teachers has been submitted to my Department by one of the teacher unions. This will be examined in the context of general proposals relating to the teaching profession in the forthcoming Green Paper.
Would the Minister accept that in a profession of 40,000 teachers, many of whom are suffering from stress, burn out and career frustration because of lack of promotional opportunities, there is an urgent need to introduce some form of welfare service or personnel policy to assist those teachers before crises arise in the case of individual teachers?
I do not have the resources to proceed at this time but I will continue my discussions with the teachers union in question to see how I can help them. I have been in my classrooms since taking up this post and I also have my own memories of classrooms. The classroom is a hot house, a place of great stress. The teacher needs enormous skill, patience and concentration to get through the day and the school year. I share the Deputy's respect for the work teachers do in the classroom. It is a very difficult job, much more so than most people understand. I have been talking to the union in question and I have asked them to consider, for example, what contribution the union might make to support their own members were such a scheme to be introduced. Given that I have laid out six aims in the introduction and that the first aim is to help the disadvantaged pupil, I have asked them to consider whether it would be legitimate for me to use funding for purposes other than that at the start. These are issues I am teasing out with the union in question.
Does the Minister not agree that there would be no need for a welfare service for teachers if he would realise that there are many teachers trapped in situations from which they cannot get out? There have been changes in curricula, increasing classroom pressures and growing demands on teachers. The OECD have already identified that the system is suffering from hardening of the arteries and that it would make good economic as well as good educational and social sense to take in young, bright and highly motivated graduates and young trained teachers at the bottom of the scale and let out people at the top of the scale, thereby reinvigorating the entire profession?
We need a mixture of the bright young sparks and experienced teachers. It is an idea in which I am very interested. There is a substantial Exchequer implication in large scale early retirement and I am doing the sums to see if I can put some package together. I do not want to promise anything at this stage.
Can I ask a final supplementary?
I am sorry, Deputy.
It is my question.
I know that. The Deputy asked a series of questions, the Chair must be obeyed at some stage.
