Teaching degree duration could be reduced to stop students ‘working for free’

There are calls in Cork for the length of a secondary school teaching degree to be reduced.

The Professional Masters in Education (PME) went from one year to two years in the last decade, and a Cork teacher said that students are essentially paying to work for free.

The Cork South Paddy Mulcahy branch of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) proposed a motion at the union’s annual convention that the union campaigns to reduce the programme to a year.

Halved

Ann Piggott, who read the motion, told The Echo that the length of the degree could easily be halved without compromising on the professional quality of the teachers.

“Trainee teachers are going to college for two years now and they are paying an awful lot of money for it,” she said.

She explained at the convention: “The PME is a two-year programme for people who satisfy the Teaching Council Subject Requirement in a minimum of one subject and who want to teach in second-level schools.

“Since 2014, the training period for student teachers has doubled from one year to two.

“The previous one-year qualification, the HDip, allowed access to teaching jobs.”

From speaking to PME students, Ms Piggott said that “they said they only spent a few hours in college in year two, they stated the material covered was not so different from what they had studied in year one; and for most of the time in year two they were in schools — from a content perspective, it appears that all material could be covered in one year.

Free work

“The ‘free’ work being done in schools is a great way to fill the gaping black holes in timetables during the current teacher shortage — but it costs a lot of money to become a teacher.

“In years one and two of the PME, students will pay approximately €6,500 each year, €13,000 to colleges to gain a teaching qualification.”

She said that paying so much money to do unpaid work in schools, on top of rent, fuel, heat, and transport “means that young people from certain socio-economic backgrounds will not be able to afford the costs of two years of training”.

“Consequently, when the training time and costs doubled, there was a significant fall in applications when 1,200 HDip applicants fell to 800 PME applications.”

This two years is on top of a three- or four-year degree, she said.

Anyone who studies a degree teaching programme right from the start will have training periods combined with school placements and be fully qualified in four years, so “an inequality exists”, she said.

“With enormous debts after a long training programme, and little prospect of saving for a home, younger teachers are going to Dubai to pay off debts and save,” but this unnecessary debt could be minimised by reducing the second year of the PME, she maintained.

The motion was carried by the convention, meaning that the ASTI will advocate for the reduction of the PME, with Ms Piggott telling The Echo that there was “a good response from the members to the motion”.