Northern Ireland schools are facing ‘unprecedented challenges’ as they head into a new year, according to the head of a leading teachers’ union.
Jacquie White, General Secretary of the Ulster Teachers’ Union, was speaking as pupils return to the classroom this week for the new school term.
The new academic year comes as many families continue to struggle with the cost-of-living crisis while pressure is also mounting from teachers in the midst of industrial action over pay and working conditions.
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Teachers are represented by the Northern Ireland Teachers Council (NITC) which includes five unions - the NASUWT, INTO, UTU, NEU and NAHT. The main unions are taking action short of strike after rejecting as ‘inadequate’ a pay offer last February.
Northern Ireland’s education system is also facing substantial budget cuts. When delivering a budget for Northern Ireland in November, the Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris warned the Department of Education that it needed to make significant cuts to its "current spending trajectory".
So as we go into 2023, Jacquie White has warned that Northern Ireland's "entire education system – from pre-school to third level – is braced for unchartered waters as the crisis in the sector deepens".
“We thought we had challenges before the pandemic with cuts to resources, especially for our most vulnerable children, and salary squeezes which in effect eroded teachers’ income, but they were nothing to what teachers, pupils and parents have faced in the last two years,” said Ms White.
“During lockdown we helped keep schools open for key workers’ children so the NHS, for instance, could continue functioning and we navigated our own way through online teaching to minimise the impact of lockdown on our children’s learning.
“Now, however, we’ve returned to the same under-funded classrooms, poorly resourced and failing systems we had before – except these have now been exacerbated by the pandemic.
“Like our colleagues in the NHS we too face the possibility of heightened industrial action in a desperate effort to focus the minds of the decision-makers who have been grinding our education system into the ground for years now.
“Teachers have been driven to these lengths, left with no option, in a bid to give our profession the recognition it deserves and thus ensure the best educational outcomes for our children.
“Industrial action is a last resort and only comes after years of under-funding which - not just on those days of industrial action but day in day out, year in year out - impacts our children’s potential.
“It is with heavy hearts that teachers face a new year with these prospects and we can only hope now that our actions will finally shake and shame the decision-makers into doing the right thing by our children and their teachers.”
Last October, members of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) teaching union embarked on industrial action short of strike.
The action by the union, which represents more than 500 school leaders in Northern Ireland, includes a refusal to facilitate or co-operate with some ministerial and senior civil servant visits to schools, as well as a refusal to provide information, data or financial planning to employers.
Dr Graham Gault, director of NAHT NI, told Belfast Live: "It's a shame that one of the things we seem to be so good at, in Northern Ireland, is plunging directly into crises that are entirely avoidable and about which we have been well warned.
"The opening of 2023 seems to be yet another iteration of this same old cycle. School leaders have been warning that our schools have been sliding quickly into a financial crisis for years.
"They have been warning that the most basic provision and services for our most vulnerable children have been being decimated and that our special sector has been becoming dangerously oversubscribed and under-resourced, generating enormous repercussions across all of our school sectors."
"These things have all come to pass, and are continuing to impact very heavily on our children."
He added: "Amongst the latest crises, of which the government has been well warned, and which could have been avoided had political will been there, relates to the ongoing industrial dispute between all of the teaching unions and the employing authorities.
"Year-on-year, real-terms pay cuts have seen our teacher and school leader pay cut by almost 30%. The employing authorities were warned that a dispute was coming, and the government had opportunities, both before and after the last election, to resolve the issues before the industrial landscape became too difficult.
"The obvious failure to do so, however, saw all of the teaching unions, including the NAHT, the school leaders' union, balloting members and embarking on industrial action short of strike. Reaching this stage was not inevitable; it could have and should have been avoided.
"It should also be said, however, that the unions want a resolution, and the government could restore fair pay to our teachers and school leaders now, thereby avoiding this dispute inevitably spiralling into more serious territory.
"This is, I suppose, yet another warning of what is to come. I just wish, for the sake of our children and the people who work so diligently and self-sacrificially on behalf of our children, that it would be heeded."
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