OT posts re teacher T&C's removed from AIB Redundancy Thread

One aspect of the teachers T&C I would change, and which would save the State a load of money is the double payment for supervising State exams.

Full time teachers get paid for school holidays including the exam period. Yet the State pays them an additional full wage on top of their regular one for supervising State exams. Why can't they do the job for their existing wage? Afterall, we are already paying them a full wage for the duration of the State exams. I am very surprised that this is not one of the productivity issues in the Croke Park agreement.
 

I did extra classes during my holidays when I was in secondary school. Plenty of kids did. Many kids sign up to do supervised study groups or homework clubs after school (facilitated by teachers).

We want education to be productive but we don't want large class sizes. We want children with learning difficulties and special needs to get the same education as every other kid but we can't afford to pay for special needs teachers. We don't want to extend the length of the school day (fair enough). We want kids to choose subjects like maths and science which are teaching intensive subjects. We want all these things but yet we close our schools down for months during the year.

I know that principals work during the holidays but the vast majority of teachers don't. I just think it is a waste of resources. Things they could do during the quiet holiday period include training and development, class planning, individual student plans to name a few. How many of our teachers are actually trained to deal with special needs children? How many of our teachers need training? This can all be done during the summer months.
 
I've got mixed views on this. Firstly, a lot of good teachers work more hours then they actually spend in class, be it correcting homework or preparing lesson plans. Some other examples, my smallie is starting school in September and recently we attended a meeting for new parents which was held in the evening and the headmistress and 3 teachers were at it. In fairness, they were there til nearly 10 pm showing parents around and answering questions. Another example is a friend of mine who is a head master in a small country school, he usually spends a couple of weeks of the summer holidays fixing things in the school, organising maintenance people to come in (eg to fix the heating) etc.

Having said all of that, I do think our children don't spend enough time in schools and certainly, there is an arguement from an educational perspective for them spending more time in the classroom.

I'm also well aware that there are plenty of teachers out there who put very little in outside the classroom and are not much cop in it either. I'm sure everyone can remember teachers who inspried them to learn more and teachers who were a complete and utter waste of space. To me, the bigger issue is how can we actually get rid of bad teachers and incentivise good ones.
 
But its not always down to working hard. Lots of children will only ever achieve a certain level because they are not particularly bright. Also, some children receive more support and assistance at home. It seems to me that the less fortunate kids will feel they're being punished and not as entitled to holidays as the luckier kids.
 

One thing I dont understand is why secondary schools close for so much longer than primary schools. Surely older children doing important exams should have the shorter holidays. I know the schools are used for Junior and leaving cert exams in June but surely they could either move those exams to July or find some other way around the problem. Schools in England don't close until mid July - after A adn O levels have been sat.
 
My son is coming to the end of his first year in primary school.
He has had 2 weeks off for both Easter and Christmas and 2 one-week mid term breaks. Thats 6 weeks on top of the 9 weeks summer holidays.
IMO, it would not be unreasonable if the the Easter and Christmad break were only one week and the summer holidays were reduced by a week or two.
The children would still have a significant break during the summer and 4 one-week breaks throughout the school year.
 

Some kids dont need to work too hard to get stellar exam results, other kids work twice as hard and get bad results. It would come across as a reward for being bright or a punishment for not being bright.
 
What about a family where one child is very bright and another child struggles. Does the struggling child have to suffer the ignomy of having to get up in the morning and go back into school while the brighter child gets a lie on and a trip to the beach? Does the family's Summer break in their mobile home or their grandparents house down the country have to be curtailed because the struggling child has to have extra lessons and be consequently made to feel like a nuisance to the family for being not very bright academically?
 
Forget about extra classes for struggling students. Why do we give months off to students anyway? Especially in the leaving cert cycle and at third level. I am not having a go at teachers because this is not an Irish thing and there is obviously something specific to the sector that justifies it. I just want to know what it is. In my leaving cert year, myself and numerous friends went to grinds until 9pm every Friday just to stand still in subjects that we were not been taught properly. I was lucky that i could afford it. Most kids want to learn. As someone said earlier, there are wonderful teachers who are not paid enough (one gave me help for free because I was struggling) but it just strikes me as a very protected profession that is designed to suit the employees rather than the customers.
 
T McGibney said:
Would you care to expand on your reasons for thinking so?
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Because they don't. On average, once you factor in summer, easter and christmas holidays, mid term breaks, bank holidays, teacher training days, school trips etc etc, an average Irish child at national school spends 3 and a half days a week at school. In a non-exam year in secondry school, it's even less, about 3.2 days a week.

I'm not saying that a child should be 9-5 52 weeks a year, they are children and need time to play etc, but why on earth do secondry school kids have 3 months off?
 
The original reason we have such a long summer break is so that children could help out on the farm during the busy harvest time in late summer/early autumn. Also the reason it is biased towards early autumn i.e. July/Aug rather than June/July. This reason no longer exists.
 

This is an interesting theory but I'm not sure if it has any basis in reality. Its a long, long time since Britain was an agricultural nation, yet their school holidays are in July/August. Ditto any continental European country I can think of.
 

I don't dispute any of that, but you still haven't given a single reason why you think that children would benefit from spending longer at school.
 
T McGibney said:
I don't dispute any of that, but you still haven't given a single reason why you think that children would benefit from spending longer at school.
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Cause they might learn more. Why not extend the school day by half an hour for example and teach them a languague? Why not extend the school year by 2 or 3 weeks more and teach them more computer skills or maths. ?
 
Mpsox said:
Cause they might learn more. Why not extend the school day by half an hour for example and teach them a languague? Why not extend the school year by 2 or 3 weeks more and teach them more computer skills or maths. ?
Click to expand...
Children also learn important life skills by playing pretend games with their friends, and by climbing trees, and by poking dead animals with sticks, and by visiting the beach, or their cousins, or an art gallery. There is more to life than classrooms (or publically paid childminding, as some people seem to expect).
 
Mpsox said:
Cause they might learn more. Why not extend the school day by half an hour for example and teach them a languague? Why not extend the school year by 2 or 3 weeks more and teach them more computer skills or maths. ?
Click to expand...

Excellent point...I might add to that,perhaps the teachers who give grinds could do them at a reduced rate after the school day, thereby making use of the premises as well ?
Kids have all weekend,and after school to play pretend,and that only holds water up to a certain age.Though most of their friends are also in school so perhaps that would be an idea to add on to the school time?
 
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