Teachers to tell about planned changes
By
JENNY LONG
Post-primary teachers will mount a campaign telling the public about changes in education administration planned by the Government. Many people did not fully understand the proposals outlined in “Tomorrow’s Schools” and the effects they could have, said the regional president of the PostPrimary Teachers’ Association, Mr Kevin McSweeney. Emphasising that he was making personal comments because the matter had not been fully discussed by the association’s executive, he said the Government’s proposals did not give the details, but these would be critical. Although the new proposals would give more power to the Ministry of Education than the central agency had at present, “it will be the
school’s board of trustees which gets the blame if things go wrong.”
“It is the blame which is being devolved,” Mr McSweeney said. The campaign would promote better alternatives for education reform than the Government’s “Tomorrow’s Schools.” The Secondary School Staffing Report, released some years ago, had shown that changes were needed in the way staff numbers were calculated in schools, Mr McSweeney said. The report’s recommendations, which had been agreed by the Education Department, the P.P.T.A. and the Secondaiy School Boards’ Association, had not been fully implemented. The staffing report recommended a “needsbased” rather than a rollbased way of determining staffing, Mr McSweeney said.
While the Government proposed that the forumla for determining each school’s grant from next year would be based on the school’s needs, it had yet to determine how that would be done. “It is a nice statement, but unless we know how it is to be done we tend to distrust it because of our experiences in the past.” Schools would hold union meetings during the next two weeks, allowed under the Labour Relations Act, and members would be given information about “Tomorrow’s Schools,” Mr McSweeney said. Teachers also needed to be certain that their existing conditions of service would be maintained. Even if the changes proposed were for the benefit of pupils, it was important that the cost to teacher morale and security was not too high, Mr McSweeney said.
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Press, 24 September 1988, Page 18
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351Teachers to tell about planned changes Press, 24 September 1988, Page 18
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