Students and jobless to be hit by teaching cuts
TEACHER job cuts could cost at least 9,000 school-leavers and jobless a place on a further education course next September, it was warned last night.
Vocational Education Committee (VEC) schools and colleges expect to lose over 400 teaching posts next September.
The country's 33 VECs have done their sums after the announcement of Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe's reduced teacher allocations for the 2009/10 academic year.
According to the Irish Vocational Education Association (IVEA), the representative body for the VECs, the cuts translate into:
- 164 job losses in VEC second-level schools.
- 157 job losses in the Further Education/Post-Leaving Certificate (FE/PLC) sector.
- 64-65 job losses among teachers dealing with disadvantage.
- 17 job losses in English language support.
IVEA general secretary Michael Moriarty said that as well as damaging the education of second-level students, the cuts would leave 9,000, or more of the most "at risk" school-leavers and adult learners without a place on an FE/PLC course next autumn.
"PLC courses cater particularly to school leavers whose Leaving Certificate results may not be sufficient to gain them direct access to either institutes of technology or universities -- a group of young people who will be particularly at risk of unemployment in the current economic climate."
Retrain
As well as that, there were people who were losing their jobs because of the severe economic downturn, who will want to retrain and reskill.
Mr Moriarty said the problem revolved around the "cap" limiting enrolments to PLC courses to 30,000.
Because of the rising demand for FE/PLC courses, Mr Moriarty said VECs catered for an additional 3,000 students in the current year.
But he said the cutbacks would make it impossible for the VECs to absorb 3,000 additional students next year -- as he predicted that that the figure would rise by at least 300pc.
- Katherine Donnelly
