Teaching unions have warned that moves to restrict career breaks will worsen staff shortages.
Joanne Irwin, president of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, said that limiting the option would make it harder to retain secondary school teachers.
More than 2,200 teachers are on career breaks of up to five years. Schools have now been told that they can be granted only if the vacancy can be filled. Ms Irwin said: “This is yet another ill-advised sticking plaster approach that ignores the urgent need to remedy a much more serious problem. Restrictions on career breaks seriously risk exacerbating the crisis both in the recruitment and retention of teachers.”
Primary schools are struggling to recruit substitutes to cover absences and secondaries have reported difficulties in finding teachers for some subjects. The number of people applying to the profession has dropped by 62 per cent in the past five years and many of those who do qualify choose to find work abroad, in part because of anger over a two-tier pay system. Teachers who entered the workforce after the financial crisis are paid less than their colleagues.
Richard Bruton, the education minister, said: “While a career break is an important option, it is a discretionary scheme which requires the approval of the school.
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“It has the effect of replacing a permanent position in a school with a temporary one, where a school is left in a position where it can only offer a one-year temporary contract to prospective candidates. This is not appealing to many teachers given the large number of permanent jobs which are available.”
Ms Irwin dismissed Mr Bruton’s concerns. “Pay inequality is the problem, not career breaks,” she said. “Yet the minister stubbornly and foolishly continues to focus on the symptom rather than the disease.”
Sheila Nunan, general secretary of the Irish National Teacher’s Association, said that there was no evidence that schools had difficulties in filling vacancies caused by teachers on career breaks and that they created employment for new recruits. “Stopping breaks would close off those employment opportunities and lead to new entrants being unemployed,” she said.
Diarmaid de Paor, deputy general secretary of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland, said that maternity leave was one of the main reasons behind vacancies. “It is good for all of society to support these new families through maternity leave, and also through career breaks in so far as possible,” he said. Mr de Paor added that career breaks helped to make teaching attractive and urged schools to continue to grant them.