Transfer of 170 surplus teachers to save €10m

UP to 170 second-level teachers will be moved to other schools within a 50km radius under the terms of the Croke Park deal.

The transfer of the teachers will save the Exchequer around €10m a year, as they will fill vacancies in other schools that would otherwise be filled by hiring new teachers or keeping temporary teachers on the payroll.

A Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) ballot of members in second-level schools is expected to show a majority of them in favour of the agreement when the results are released tomorrow evening.

Union members have been warned by the Department of Education and Skills that the only alternative to Croke Park is redundancies.

The other second-level union, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, has already accepted the deal, which involves an extra hour's work per week.

Most of the 170 teachers are employed in traditional voluntary secondary schools where they are above the officially allocated quota of staff.

Teachers become "surplus" to requirements for a number of reasons, such as a drop in pupil enrolments.

The department has refused to release the names of the schools with surplus staff to the Irish Independent under Freedom of Information legislation, but these have been obtained unofficially and show that half a dozen schools have at least six teachers each over the quota.

But while the second-level TUI members are expected to accept the terms of the deal, there is no certainty about the third-level lecturers in the institutes of technology, where a very strong campaign of opposition has been launched.

- John Walshe Education Editor

Irish Independent