A leading teacher’s union boss has said there will be thousands of teachers absent from schools from tomorrow because of Covid.
General Secretary of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), John Boyle seven 15% or up to eight thousand teachers will be missing when classes restart after h Christmas break.
Mr Boyle, who is from Annagry in West Donegal, said he even envisaged situation where children will have to be taught at home.
He was speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
He said the period of school up to the midterm was going to be “extremely difficult” because of the impact of Covid on teachers.
He added that priority will be given to those children who “don’t thrive in the remote learning scenario”, particularly younger children and those with additional needs.
He said that he was deeply concerned about finding enough teachers to keep the system running and added “there isn’t a hope” that there would be enough replacement teachers.
Despite this, he said he is a little bit more upbeat about the situation this morning and that work on the issues had been carried out over the Christmas period.
However, Mr Boyle said there is a lot more to be done and called on the Government to reintroduce contact tracing in primary schools.
He said that public health officials gave unions assurances yesterday that they would continue to meet stakeholders and that those attending the meeting also got a “huge amount of data” to show that children are not driving the pandemic.
However, he pointed out that over 60,000 primary school children did contract the virus before Christmas, and said much more had to be done about filtration in classrooms.
‘I’m still beseeching Government to have another look at the contact tracing. I know they’re under pressure at the moment, but at the same time it was abandonment and cannot be allowed to continue. It worked well while we had it,” he added.
