As many of us drop children back to school this week, we have seen the pickets of Fórsa workers – secretarial and care-taking staff – who are demanding that they be treated like other school workers, especially access to a public service pension scheme.
The attitude of the Department of Education should not come as a surprise.
Until recently, the Department paid schools to pay secretaries. This allowed the maintenance of a crucial fiction: that it was not the ‘paymaster’ of these staff, and bore no responsibility for their terms and conditions, even though it provided the funds.
Even now, as it pays the wages of these workers, officials play semantics to argue that these workers are not entitled to access the public service pension scheme.
My mother spent the last years of her life in a similar battle with the Department, as a teacher paid by it to teach in a pre-school for Traveller children. The department paid her as a national school teacher, but refused her access to the teachers’ pension scheme. With help from her union, the INTO, she challenged this exclusion, and was successful at every level from a Rights Commissioner and the Labour Court, up to the High Court and Court of Appeal, each of which accepted that she was – for all intents and purposes – an employee of the department, like all other teachers.
And then… Then the Supreme Court accepted the Department’s argument that even though it paid the wages, it was the voluntary committee that ran the school which decided not to provide a pension. To be funded from what hypothetical funding stream, given the reliance on department resources, was of course not for the court to decide…
My mother’s case – as with that of Fórsa workers today – lays bare the cynicism and exploitation at the heart of how we organise and fund public services in Ireland.
In education, the Department favours a ‘tripartite’ model, where the state provides the funding, but is at arm’s length from actual responsibility for providing education. That falls to patrons – primarily religious organisations – which own the schools and control ethos, and the voluntary boards of management which oversee individual schools.
Discrimination
That model has served the interests of both the state and the church over the years.
The church has maintained significant control over our education system, including the power to fire staff to uphold the patron’s ‘ethos. It was not until Ruairi Quinn drew up legislation in 2014 that the exemption from employment anti-discrimination legislation became limited to ‘reasonable and proportionate’ actions. The State, meantime, has the power of the purse to enforce its preferred outcomes – and the knowledge that any shortfalls in funding will fall to principals and boards of management to address.
Left out in all of this are workers, who are vulnerable to the whims of patrons as well as having a non-employer, in the department, that can dodge what we would expect to be its responsibilities.
We have similar situations in other areas, like health, where the state is happy to funnel resources to a plethora of charitable bodies and private entities, rather than take on responsibility for the workers who keep so much of our system running.
It is long past time for us to have a proper, publicly-funded and publicly-managed education system. One that provides workers with fairness and security. One that adequately funds all schools, ensuring that all children have equal opportunities, without relying on parents and others to make up the funding shortfall. And one that provides a professional management resource to support schools, without equivocation or fragmentation.
Dr Andrew Ó Baoill is a lecturer at the School of English, Media and Creative Arts at University of Galway.
