Restructuring of Teacher Education

yurmothrintites

The DES and Quinn have accepted proposals for the merging and closing of Colleges of Teacher Training and a restructuring of Initial Teacher Education (ITE).

This has been coming for a few years since the McCarthy report was published, recommending that small colleges should be closed or merged.

Thoughts? The report emphasised the high quality of ITE in Ireland and the moves will hopefully address the oversupply of teachers being trained in the country. It will also allow for student teachers to have more active involvement in universities and colleges, which is absent in alot of the B. Ed. degrees.

Employment of staff and relocation will undoubtedly lead to problems though, with a lot of staff being unable/unwilling to work in new, relocated areas. I can see this causing a stir.

Ruairi Quinn has no problem introducing cut after cut in education funding, DEIS schools, capitation grants and staffing. Curious to see how he can find the funding for this along with the Junior Certificate reform. Will he sacrifice more funding for schools to allow this plan to evolve?

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0905/teacher-training-education.html

An international panel has recommended that the 19 teacher training centres be replaced by just six.

The reduction would be achieved through closures and mergers.
Under one of the recommendations, St Patrick’s College in Dublin is to be integrated along with Mater Dei into Dublin City University.
In the report published today, the panel suggests that this new centre be located at St Patrick’s Drumcondra campus.

The panel also recommended that Trinity College, University College Dublin, the National College of Art and Design and the Marino Institute should form another entity, located possibly on the existing Marino campus.

In Limerick, Mary Immaculate College and the teacher training at Limerick Institute of Technology would integrate into the University of Limerick.
The report recommended that Cork Institute of Technology teacher education be integrated into University College Cork and the teacher training colleges in Letterfrack, Co Galway and Thurles, Co Tipperary be closed.

It also recommended that St Angela's College in Sligo, which trains Home Economics teachers, be moved to NUI Galway.

The report went to Cabinet yesterday and Ruairi Quinn will now ask the Higher Education Authority to draw up an implementation plan.
The panel was chaired by Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg and was commissioned by Mr Quinn in April to review the structure of teacher education provision.

The panel recommended that teachers need to be trained in environments where there is a "culture of research" that would encourage more enquiry and critical thought among students.
The report criticised the over-reliance on part-time staff in many of the existing colleges, and expressed "surprise and concern" that the issue of teacher supply and demand was not being addressed.

It said the academic standard of applicants to teacher training courses in Ireland was among the highest, if not the highest, in the world.
But it said teachers need to be challenged and developed to their full potential.

The report noted that all teachers in Finland complete education to Masters level in research-based universities and this should be a long-term aspiration for Ireland.

Evaleigh

Having attended one of the colleges in questions, I feel sad about this. I think that people who attend these smaller colleges have a great college experience with a brilliant student-lecturer relationship. They also have high standards in terms of work and research. I think it's a shame and a waste to see unique colleges which are part of our history being closed all over the country.

bdoo

I suppose there is an element of 'economic sense' to it.

I think the teacher education courses are a long way ahead of the dip in many cases, I would hope that this is not diluted when the smaller colleges are absorbed.

Not a word about maynooth! Also does anyone know what teacher ed courses are in cit and lit? I didn't realise there were any.

Evaleigh

The Irish Times says Maynooth and Froebel are to be joined, I think.

TheBody

Evaleigh wrote: »

The Irish Times says Maynooth and Froebel are to be joined, I think.

That has been in the pipes for a few years now. I stand to correction on this but I think that this year, Froebel first years are registered to N.U.I. Maynooth.

sitstill

I think overall, these are good developments. We don't need so many teacher training colleges. I think it's s good thing to close down a lot of the small ones around the country and align the remaining ones to the big universities. Also, it mentions that they will look at the supply and demand of teachers - this is good as it will hopefully lead to less unemployed teachers as there won't be hundreds of people graduating every year who essentially have combinations of subjects that the system does not need.

happywithlife

i didn't even know there was teacher training in some of the places mentioned e.g. thurlus - what training can you do there? so it makes sense i suppose to merge a lot of that
my own experience is with st angela's and given that they already closed the college in dublin, and coupled with the HUGE amount of investment recently put into the college with new buildings etc i honestly can't see it closing

dory

TheBody wrote: »

That has been in the pipes for a few years now. I stand to correction on this but I think that this year, Froebel first years are registered to N.U.I. Maynooth.

Yea, they are. That one has been in the works for a while. I'd be very sad to see this happen. One example of those colleges being leaps ahead of the NUI courses - in St. Angela's you have to do a portion of your training with the Leaving Cert and Junior Cert classes. In the Dip you spend most of your time playing games with first years. I hope those small colleges have a big say in how things will be run!

happywithlife wrote: »

i didn't even know there was teacher training in some of the places mentioned e.g. thurlus - what training can you do there?

I believe there is a Religion and Irish, or something like that, course there.

rainbowtrout

dory wrote: »

Yea, they are. That one has been in the works for a while. I'd be very sad to see this happen. One example of those colleges being leaps ahead of the NUI courses - in St. Angela's you have to do a portion of your training with the Leaving Cert and Junior Cert classes. In the Dip you spend most of your time playing games with first years. I hope those small colleges have a big say in how things will be run!



I believe there is a Religion and Irish, or something like that, course there.

I think most teacher training degrees are run like that. It was that way in UL.

implausible

yurmothrintites wrote: »

Thoughts? The report emphasised the high quality of ITE in Ireland and the moves will hopefully address the oversupply of teachers being trained in the country.

There is a large elephant in the room - Hibernia. Will RQ rein in the numbers here too or will he continue to allow them churn out graduates with feck all hope of a job?

Overall, I think it's a good move. Looking at the list, there are too many colleges operating teacher-training. Hopefully, this will lead to streamlined standardised teacher training. We all know anecdotally that graduates of certain colleges are really well organised, have done tonnes of TP and come to teaching better prepared that graduates of other colleges.

evolving_doors

implausible wrote: »

yurmothrintites wrote: »

Thoughts? The report emphasised the high quality of ITE in Ireland and the moves will hopefully address the oversupply of teachers being trained in the country.

There is a large elephant in the room - Hibernia. Will RQ rein in the numbers here too or will he continue to allow them churn out graduates with feck all hope of a job?.

My understanding was that the government can only recommend to universities what to do rather than actually force them to do anything...

Anyway, what was worth mentioning in the report was that the situation with the profession becoming part time needed to stop...about time

StillWaters

implausible wrote: »

yurmothrintites wrote: »

Thoughts? The report emphasised the high quality of ITE in Ireland and the moves will hopefully address the oversupply of teachers being trained in the country.

There is a large elephant in the room - Hibernia. Will RQ rein in the numbers here too or will he continue to allow them churn out graduates with feck all hope of a job?s.

Why would he? Some would say Graduatez of many disciplines are being churned out with little hope of a domestic job in the mid term. Do you wish to restrict entry to the profession?

implausible

StillWaters wrote: »

Why would he? Some would say Graduatez of many disciplines are being churned out with little hope of a domestic job in the mid term. Do you wish to restrict entry to the profession?

Yes. I think the numbers should be restricted for a few years until the huge glut of qualified unemployed teachers is cleared and the casualisation of the profession is halted.

The number of teachers required can be fairly easily calculated. It's time some common sense prevailed.

StillWaters

implausible wrote: »

StillWaters wrote: »

Why would he? Some would say Graduatez of many disciplines are being churned out with little hope of a domestic job in the mid term. Do you wish to restrict entry to the profession?

Yes. I think the numbers should be restricted for a few years until the huge glut of qualified unemployed teachers is cleared and the casualisation of the profession is halted.

The number of teachers required can be fairly easily calculated. It's time some common sense prevailed.

Just for teaching, or would you suggest the same for other professions where there is a high unemployment rate?

Lord TSC

StillWaters wrote: »

Just for teaching, or would you suggest the same for other professions where there is a high unemployment rate?

The arguement can be made that the government cannot restrict private companies from hiring and firing, so thus don't have much ground to regulate who trains for those positions. The government don't know how many people will come and go in the private sector (a new company could open tomorrow requiring a tonne of jobs, for instance) while they know exactly how many or how few teachers they want to hire and fire over the next few years.

As far as I know, they already regulate intake into police training programs (and possibly nurses/doctors as well, but not 100% sure on that). Someone can correct me there if I'm wrong. Teaching, meanwhile, is a public sector job which they seem content in letting 1000s train and then go abroad/sit at home.

coolperson05

From the document itself:

The Review Panel was surprised and concerned that the issue of teacher supply and demand has not been addressed in Ireland as it has been elsewhere. For example, a teacher workforce planning exercise is carried out annually in the four jurisdictions of the UK to ensure an appropriate supply of high-quality teachers covering geographical areas, education sectors and curriculum specialisms.

In Ireland, the number of students entering the publicly-funded institutions which provide primary teaching is capped by the DES though the rationale for those numbers is unclear, especially in the light of numbers in the private sector which remain uncapped. In relation to post-primary provision, while historically quotas were in place, in more recent years
these quotas have not been rigidly enforced.

Source: http://www.education.ie/en/Press-Events/Press-Releases/2012-Press-Releases/Report-of-the-International-Review-Panel-on-the-Structure-of-Initial-Teacher-Education-Provision-in-Ireland.pdf

They mentioned it as one of the findings that numbers should be kept under closer inspection. And I think the same could be done with other professions, why churn out hundreds of teachers or nurses or architects or whatever, if there are not enough jobs for them? Just for the colleges to take their money?

derb12

I agree that the numbers of teachers overall and the numbers of teachers with different subject combinations should be capped.
With private sector you can't predict what will be needed so people have to take their chances. Anyone who graduated as an architect this year will be facing a very different prospect from what they expected when they began their studies. Those starting architecture right now might have fantastic prospects in 4 years time after the recovery has happened and we are all building again .
For education it is more predictable, what with regular census information telling us how many new pupils there will be. Dramatic influxes of families with young kids like we had in the early 2000s in unlikely to occur again and even then, we had a shortage of schools, not teachers.