It is “almost impossible” to find a substitute.
The Irish Primary Principals Network have shared concerns that primary school pupils may need to be sent home early due to a lack of available substitute teachers.
The principal of Drogheda’s Saint Mary’s Parish Primary School, John Weir, spoke on the Today with Claire Byrne programme on RTÉ Radio 1 this morning about the challenges they’ve faced in the past few weeks.
“It’s almost impossible to find a sub at the moment. As you say, we’re a very, very large school, so we would have days there last week where I would have had 8 or 9 teachers out,” he said.
“We have a local network of schools here, and I know in the month of September alone, out of 35 schools we had almost 300 days where we couldn’t source a sub,” he added.
The president of the IPPN, Brian O’Doherty also spoke on the programme to share what plans the network had to assist schools struggling to find substitutes.
“We have met with the Department [of Education] and proposed possible solutions with the view to increasing substitute capacity in the system, and I know some progress has been made on that.
“The Teaching Council would have emailed all teachers on the register requesting that anyone who might be in a position to provide substitute cover would make themselves available to do so.”
O’Doherty shared some ideas that had to be scrapped to assist with the difficulty in finding substitutes, including the usage of student teachers as substitutes.
“They aren’t consistently available to us because they have course commitments”, he explained.
According to O’Doherty, the majority of absences in teachers were credited to the ongoing Covid pandemic.
“If a teacher has symptoms, they need to stay at home, so that’s adding to the level of absences there at the moment.”
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