Teachers claim they are "at breaking point" over controversial proposals

Hundreds of teachers in the region joined educators around the country in staging a lunchtime protest outside schools this afternoon, to demonstrate against Department's major reforms.
Key to the proposed overhaul is the abolition of the traditional Junior Certificate exams for continuous assessment of students by their own teachers, for a new Junior Cycle Student Award (JCSA), to be issued by schools.
Technology will take a central role, while there will be a bigger choice of subjects with opportunities to study short courses in Chinese, computing and artistic performance.
Today's lunchtime protest follows the breakdown of discussions last January, when education partners including unions, the department, principals and school boards held a working group meeting. The discussions failed to defuse the tension over the reforms and several unions are now planning to ballot members on non-cooperation with the controversial proposals.
Unions believe the reforms could cause lasting damage to the education system.
Jason Murphy, TUI Union Representative of Breifne College, where more than 60 teachers took part in the protest, told The Anglo-Celt: “We haven’t been consulted at all as a teaching body, there have been no in service days regarding the new Junior Cycle and very little information has been given to us. We more or less hear everything directly from the media.”
Fr Murphy went so far as to state that Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn, as a member of government and of the Union-leaning Labour Party, had “misrepresented” teachers.
“They haven’t acted as a Labour Party should at all. We as educators are supposed to be teaching this new junior cert reform and it is just being foisted upon us. We are at breaking point now - teacher morale is very low.
“We don’t know what’s happening, there’s a reduction in the number of subjects being taught at Junior Cert level, and we don’t know what subjects are being cut.
“There doesn’t seem to be any real assessment guidlines - it’ll be very subjective and when you’re living in a small town like Cavan you’re meeting parents on the street, and you’re ‘assessing’ their children at Junior Cert level, can you envision the sort of problems we’ll be facing?”, Fr Murphy said.