017. Remove all Union Involvement from Teaching Council

The Teaching Council is made up of several union representatives, which make decisions on teaching conditions. The union therefore becomes both the decision maker and gatekeeper of the Teaching Council, which makes little sense. The union needs to take on the role of a strong gatekeeper from the Teaching Council. Droichead was an example of … Read more

069. Centre Broadband Hubs around Schools

Broadband provision in primary schools should be as good as the best provision in a local private dwelling or business. It would make sense for Broadband providers to start their high-speed broadband in hubs of the community, such as schools and expand from there. All parts of Ireland should be capable of receiving fibre speeds … Read more

015. Centralise and Standardise ICT

Try to find two primary schools in Ireland with exactly the same technology set up and you’d be hard pressed to do so. Every school has a mishmash of different operating systems, hardware and so on. This is generally to do with a policy failure which continues to this day.  The last time there was … Read more

014. Rethink Croke Park Hours

When all the madness of the recession was on, it seems in order to try and satiate the howls of the public about how few hours the public sector worked, an hour a week was added to our schedules. These are known as Croke Park Hours. These hours are tokenistic at best. They do not … Read more

013. Simplify the salary scale

Getting paid as a teacher is a fairly complicated affair. There are up to 27 points on the pay scale and you start off on a different point of the payscale depending on different factors. To complicate things further, if you qualified after 2011, you are on a different payscale which is less than the … Read more

012. Scrap single sex schools

Similarly to idea 9, having single sex primary schools seems to me to be out of date and out of sync with 21st century (even late 20th century!) values. All single sex schools should either amalgamate or turn themselves into 2 separate mixed primary schools (maybe make one of the two schools a non/multidenominational model … Read more

131. Start calling teachers by their first names

Educate Together schools and many Gaelscoileanna have a policy where teachers are known by their first name to the pupils. It makes sense. What other profession do we use Mr and Mrs and Ms anymore? I don’t think there are any people in my life. I call my doctor by her first name; I call … Read more

009. Should we scrap school uniforms?

I’m not sure when school uniforms became a thing in Irish primary schools but they’re certainly a thing now. There are very few schools (outside the Educate Together and CoI system) that don’t do uniforms but are they fit for purpose anymore? Parents tend to argue that they reduce bullying or they make everyone equal … Read more

130. All pupils should go to their nearest geographic school

Why don’t children always go to their nearest primary school? It seems like a fair question. The answer lies in the, at first, strange fixation that people believe they should have a choice in which primary school they can go to. However, it doesn’t take too long to understand why people want a choice because … Read more

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