New JC time and teacher allocation

Red Belly wrote: »

Am I missing something or will the classes off given to full-time teachers be "lost" to schools as teacher allocation?

A school with 40 full-time teachers effectively loses 40 teaching periods per week. This is the equivalent of a loss of about 8 senior cycle teaching groups, I.e subjects. This will compel principals to favour 30 class max size subjects over practicals. For teachers this means that what they gain in terms of time for new work they will lose by having bigger classes across the board. For students this means bigger classes, less subject options, esp at Senior Cycle, and less individual attention from teachers who have bigger classes to manage and more imperative to administer assessments than offer extra voluntary tuition, catch-up sessions and extra-curricular.

In my view, this will only work if there are significant improvements in PTR across the board - unless I've missed something. Our unions are on the verge of selling out their memberships, but also, our schools and our students. Don't get me wrong, I'm largely in favour of the proposed reforms including the assessment elements teachers seem to be most concerned about. But this can't be done on the cheap. Sooner or later the philosophy of "do more with less" inevitably leads to doing less with less and it seems to me that all proposed reforms are based on the premise that public servants, including teachers are effectively on the doss all the time and therefore if we just make them work harder we'll save a fortune. This view is BS, and in my experience true of only about 1% of public servants.

Simple economics folks, in the new proposals where is the extra money? Teachers get time off but the state doesn't pay out extra-so who really loses/gains?

RB

rainbowtrout wrote: »

Even if they are filled, the class taken off each timetable comes from a wide variety of subject areas.

Also, isn't the class to be given to teachers with JC classes? I'll have to read the documentation again, but is it being given across the board? Is it if you have a class in junior cycle, or is it if you have a class in third year (or perhaps second year given that the continuous assessment is supposed to be over two years in English).

Will a teacher who has for arguments sake has two third year classes and two second year classes on their timetable in two subject areas, be expected to do the same amount of CA as the teacher who has one third year group on their timetable?

Will there be teachers who are the only teachers of their subject in a school, who will be presented with a timetable of 22 hours anyway because that is the number of hours available in their subject (e.g. Art, Music, Metalwork, Home Ec, German etc), and just told to get on with it or be given some platitudes about being freed up when necessary?


So many questions...

Jamfa wrote: »

The 22 hours less teaching time was a major concession by the DES given that the original Framework had no mention of any allowance. The students will still have the same amount of class time (28 hours min) so around 800 new teaching posts will need to be created. There is an implementation group being set up to closely monitor the resources & capacity issues.
A 2 hour department meeting around Christmas time & May to discuss student work in CBAs is hardly a major imposition. Generally speaking most subject departments would hold 2 hour dept meetings around that time.
The 40 minutes a week less teaching to prepare for these twice yearly meetings seems like a decent deal to me. The exams & assessment task will be set & marked externally by the SEC & stand alone so therefore involve no extra work for teachers. The placards on the strike days talked about equity & fairness in relation to student assessment & the unions were successful in negotiating a major climb down by the Minister. If we did vote no & went on strike again what would our placards now say?

Red Belly wrote: »

I see nothing in the docs to suggest this is the case. Students will continue to have 28 hrs tuition alright but the pool of teaching hours available to implement this is reduced by 40mins per teacher. Therefore bigger classes, less subjects. Maybe about 800 extra teachers would cover it but where are they in the docs we're voting on?