To feel awful for my sister, i don’t know how to help her?

[DurableMatts]

My sister is a primary school teacher. She has been Job sharing her post for the last 3 years (2days 1 week and 3days the next) she is now ready to go back full time from sept as her dd will be in school. ( and will be attending the school she teaches in) she is so nervous to notify her school because the woman who has been doing the job share with has had a really tough time lately and has had to leave her dh. Now I know this woman probably will be able to find another job but it will be a drive away and you guesses it (she doesn’t drive) she lives a short walk from the school. She knows this other woman is very emotional and has herself all worked up over how she will react to the news. When she renewed the job share last year the other teacher made a flippant comment about how after all this time she considered the job share a given. She is sick at the thought of it all kicking off this week and I’m so worried about her.
We are in Ireland and this is how the system works here, a job share usually is a post shared by someone who owns the full time post as such.

No. The permanent teacher can decide each year whether to apply for a job share or not. So they need to apply by end of January so the role can be advertised if necessary. This will.take.effect from the next school year in September.

The teacher cannot just decide halfway through the year (e.g. March) that they want to stop the job share immediately.

That sounds like a crazy system. But surely the other woman knows and understands the system, that basically she gets kicked out of the job after several years if the job share partner who ‘owns’ the job decides they want full time again? So it shouldn’t be a massive shock. I think the system is nuts though.

It's basically just a one year contract and can be renewed at 1 year intervals or not renewed. Similar to other sectors where you might cover a fixed 6 month maternity cover contract, that can be renewed over and over until the original person comes back.

Ah, ok! Thanks for clearing it up.

It's actually a very good system that works really well in practice. In most schools two permanent members of staff jobshare and then a temporary job is created for the year for someone else. It would be much more unusual a situation like the ops where an outsider comes in to jobshare when they don't have any job of their own. Teachers tend to jobshare at a certain stage in life (young children etc) and they have a job at that stage.

The system is very different here, as far as my understanding is you don’t just finish college and apply for a permanent role…you have to work up a certain amount of time
in other contracts to get onto a panel and then you are given a permanent position that comes up in your area. That job is then yours permanently. If you have a husband that gets a job in another county lets say and you need to move you can take leave from your permanent role (or if you want to go travelling/sabbatical etc) and work in temp contracts somewhere else and someone else does yours temporarily until you return or not. Again I stand to be corrected on this, I could have it all arseways 🤣

I would just say this; people need someone they can vent to. Your sister lowers her anxiety by venting to you about how bad she feels, her guilt and worry. It also helps her prepare for any guilt tripping her colleague might put her through. So So you are already helping your sister by lending an ear to her verbal processing.

I feel you can also help her by repeating facts and truths to hold on to in the face of inward and outward pressure to push her boundaries. (I don’t know the details so just making some up here: You are legally entitled to take the hours back; You have not promised to give your hours away indefinitely; You are sticking to the original plan agreed upon; it’s not your responsibility that your colleague has not planned realistically for her own future knowing that the renewal date was coming up; you cannot be held responsible for expectations other people hold; even if you indicated a longer leave your circumstances can and have changed because of personal unforeseen reasons; you have a responsibility toward your family; if this lady want a more stable job she will need to apply for one.

This thread focuses way too much on the solutions for the other lady which I find to be irrelevant. That’s not for your sister to figure out. It also speculate on how just the laws are which is also not going to help your sister. The role was taken with transparency about the duration and conditions.

Not really. It's very family friendly in that teachers can work part time while their children are young, knowing they can go back full time when they're a bit older.

I think the issue these days is the shortage of teachers means they may be denied the option to job share. There's obviously nothing stopping the temporary teacher from applying for permanent jobs. They can also sub on their non working days.

You know what thank you so much for this, it really really helped 🥹

This is quite common for job shares in my country (not Ireland). Someone reduces their hours “temporarily” and then someone is employed on a fixed-term contract to cover the other hours. I job shared for years with a woman who was the actual job owner, knowing it was likely that she would want to return to full-time as her youngest child approached school age. And that’s exactly what did happen. That’s just the way it works and I knew that when I signed up for it. I was happy to because my own child was about the same age as this woman’s youngest, and I would probably be looking for full-time work at about the same time.

But I think this whole thread is really quite odd. I can’t imagine being that invested in this situation. It’s nothing to do with you. In fact, how it affects this other woman is nothing to do with your sister.

I understand why your sister is worked up but the other teacher has no grounds to kick up a fuss over this. This isn't a part-time job, it's a fixed term role of 1 year at a time sharing the hours with the teacher whose permanent role it is. She's only human and obviously entitled to be upset that that this convienient role has come to an end but she can hardly be blindsided by it, your sister is hardly going to be driving her own child to and from school every day from September and just staying home 2 or 3 days a week, the sharing was obviously going to end once the child started school.

It is a shit deal.
This is how the system works in Ireland - it's a two-tiered system that privileges insiders (i.e. people whose mother or father were teachers) and exploits all other qualified teachers who don't have family in the business by keeping them on temporary or part-time contracts. It's very closed shop in Ireland. When I was in school many moons ago, I never had a teacher from Dublin where 1/3 of the population of the Republic of Ireland lives. All teachers came from down the country. I think it's a result of Independence and Dubliners (i.e. "West Brits" or Jackeens (i.e. little Englishmen) were actively discriminated against for state jobs. I also never heard a policeman with a Dublin accent until I was nearly forty. I remember asking my father when I wa a child why all policemen (Gardai) had country accents and he told me that they sent the police to work in places they were not from. I imagine that's what his generation were told in the forties. I found out the truth when I went down to the Gaeltacht (West of Ireland Gaelic speaking areas) and found that the police there were all local. Ditto for nurses.

Myself and my sister are quite sensitive I suppose.

I was told this too, none of our Garda are local, the are from cork etc. we are not in Dublin. I suppose the Gaeltacht might be different as they would need the Irish still these days. I dunno…

This. This level of anxiety about other people's wants and hurtyfeels is not normal. She needs to learn to be tougher.

If the lie that was told to my father's generation (the first one to grow up in a Republic) were true, there should be thousands of Gardai all around the country with a Dublin accent but there are not. Teachers are the same and I'm speaking with experience in this area and nurses too. The first time I heard the derogatory term "Dublin Jackeen" was in the Gaeltacht as the bean an ti lamented that all the teenagers staying with her for 3 weeks were Dubs.

Over sensitive, to be honest. It must be exhausting and you'll both end up burnt out fretting over stuff like this.

Myself and my sister are quite sensitive I suppose.

I get why your sister might not look forward to telling her colleague this news, but it's just that-a slightly uncomfortable conversation for her.

I don't see why it affects you to the extent that you are 'really worried for her'?

It's only a very good system for the insiders.
It's a very bad system for everyone else and especially for children.
Most children in working-class schools in Dublin have teachers from the country or from the most middle-class areas of Dublin. They have few role models and as we all know role models are essential as children aspire to be like adults who are like them.

The other negative in this closed shop model is how Irish teachers have failed catastrophically to teach our "native" language to us despite it being mandatory in primary and secondary school. This level of incompetency is unrivaled anywhere else in the world.

The reason for the abject failure is clear.
The insiders never wanted the outsiders to learn Irish which was used as a filter to exclude the vast majority of people (particularly urban working class populations) out of State jobs which required Irish.
This left most of the jobs for life for the new elite.

After just 3 years of doing French in secondary school, my French was better than my Irish which I had been learning for 11 years....
As an adult, I compared the syllabus for Irish with the syllabus for French in Canada - chalk and cheese. Indian immigrants in Quebec learn French in school in no time while Irish natives follow a curriculum designed to keep us in a permanent state of ignorance at our expense as taxpayers money has been poured into this failed enterprise for generations.

It's a national disgrace.

Well the other teacher must have went to uni and done multiple teacher placements. So not driving wasn’t a barrier then, so shouldn’t be now.

Tell your sister to not to pay any attention.

But your sister has all but decided it's a disaster for her job sharer? She doesn't know that. What if she goes to a job in another school and it's the best thing that's ever happened for her? She doesn't know. Tell her to get on with it and let this woman make her next move ASAP.

DurableMatts
Ask yourself what would the other person in this have done if the shoe was on the other foot?
You know already

She has 6 months notice to find somewhere else. And maybe someone else in the school will want to jobshare next year?

Why are you so upset about teachers in Ireland? I can categorically say a huge part of what you are saying is untrue.

Im from a very working class inner city background (Deis Band 1 school first in family to go to college) and teach in a rural school in Cork where I am not from.
I got the job through open interview.

I'm not sure what your point about Irish is. Have you seen the way it is taught? Puppets, songs, stories, games and dramas. Progressing onto reading and writing. It is usually those who come from the houses with the most negative attitudes to the language struggle the most . Irish is a difficult language to learn it's grammar rules/exceptions and phonics bear little resemblance to English.

And teaching a language to children who do not hear it in day to day life or whose parents cannot speak is very challenging.

Should your sister not be discussing the matter with her higher ups in the school rather than us all speculating on here?