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.

Is your sister a people pleaser or something? She's taking on too much responsibility here. That woman's reaction or situation has nothing to do with her.

The Principal will deal with all of this. That's their job. Your sister isn't doing anything wrong, illegal, or unprofessional.

Plus, the other teacher knew what they were signing up to.

I used to back fill people in a public sector job and it was never a problem when they came back. Eventually I retrained in something else to have a stable full time job, but that was my responsibility.

What a ridiculous comment, my neices and nephews are at school in Dublin and probably 75% of their teachers are from their local area in Dublin.
The same curriculum is taught in all schools in Ireland, Dublin children are not given an inferior syllabus. And entry to university to become a teacher in all the teaching colleges in Ireland are solely based on the results in their final exams. It is the most equitable system there could be. Teachers are selected by a board of management not a parent working in a school.

In terms of guards it is a long-standing policy not station new officers in their home county or near where they grew up, to reduce potential conflicts of interest preventing guards from having to police friends, family, or people they went to school with, which is seen as crucial for impartial policing. This is common practice globally. Obviously Dublin has the highest demand for policing so a lot of guards will be assigned there.

I’ve found your contributions to this thread fascinating. They also perhaps explain why there were quite a few Irish students on my teacher trying course in the UK c.20 years ago. Brilliantly gifted teachers by the way. Our gain I guess.

Plus, am sorry to say this, but you're slightly enabling your sister here in this "feeling awful".

I know she's your younger sister. I've one too. But this is a bit indulgent in the category of awful things and also how to deal with it. A most normal response is "hope that lady finds a fulltime job, if she wants one" and thats the extent of it.

That's how you help her. Get a more practical view on things.

I work in a school. Your sister is massively overthinking this. The Principal will deal with it. Job share arrangements are always temporary.

Some Irish people go to the UK for teaching degrees as the grades required in the UK are much lower than in Ireland. Teachers in Ireland are very well paid and well respected (moreso than in the UK in my experience) so it is very competitive in terms of exam grades.
It has nothing to do with "insiders" and "outsiders", that is one of the silliest posts I have ever read.

Well the student teachers I trained alongside were brilliant. Teacher pay in the UK is pretty good once you add in TLRs. The employer pension contributions are huge (c.29%).

Good for you if you have managed to get in - is it a permanent job or are you just filling in for someone who's in Dubai on leave of absence or on maternity leave?

Btw, Irish is no more difficult to learn than any other European language.
You're just repeating a tired mantra that has been repeated Ad Infinitum since my father (long dead) was a little boy.

I didn't hear anyone speak French when I was in secondary school and yet I progressed at a much greater speed with no greater interest in that language - it was just another mandatory subject.
The difference was the curriculum.

I have children in their early twenties now and know how the Irish curriculum has changed - not nearly enough. The first thing to check is the number of nouns taught at each year in primary school and compare this to the number of French nouns taught at French schools in Canada to foreign nationals who don't even speak a European language at home. There is simply no way any child leaving primary school in Ireland has anything more than a smattering of Irish.

I also have nieces and nephews who attended "all Irish" primary schools and yet bizarrely, never speak Irish outside of school, which leads me to believe they are being taught in English despite all the funding that goes into the Gaelscoils.
The first thing you would expect is that children would speak in Irish to one another to say things they didn't want their parents to understand and this has never happened despite being taught all day long in Irish for 8 years.
That's suspect.

Imho, it's just a scam to give permanent pensionable jobs to the children of native Irish speakers.

I am in Ireland.

Please encourage her to keep it simple. Put in her application that she is going back full time (this will is just a formality). If the lady she job shares with is well liked another position may come available. Also your sister has her own personal problems with her husband’s medical issues.

I don't agree. My DD has had several job sharing teachers throughout primary, she actively enjoys having two different teachers and it all works very well.

Why does your sister get to decide? Surely if both are employed by the school one can’t decide to just take the other persons job? I must have missed something on the thread?

Is the other teacher a supply teacher/not contracted?

Ah stop.
The conspiracy theories are strong on this one.

I have been teaching 24 years.

I am so shocked that you progressed faster in a couple of years learning a language at 13 years old that at 4 years old(especially with your attitude towards it).....

We are in Ireland, it works differently here. It’s my sister’s job. The other teacher is doing the job share on a rolling temporary contract.

Gardai are not allowed patrol within a certain distance of their hometown for a certain number of years / they become a s certain grade (I can't remember the specific year). This is to avoid young gardai from.being influenced by friends / family.

They can eventually request a transfer home of one becomes available but by then they have usually settled down etc.

That’s good. It can work very well depending upon the teachers and it can also be a disaster depending on the teachers, it is great for the teachers for a balanced schedule, not so great for the students when teachers differ, ms honey vs ms sour.
Some children end up having 3 teachers.
Many children don’t like it, especially when the other 5 class in their year have a FT teacher.

You don't need to feel awful for your sister, she wants her FT hours back and she'll get them. If you are going to feel sorry for anyone, pity the other teacher who will get the heave ho (though to be fair she must have always been aware this was likely and she has until September to find a new post).

Very interesting how different the system is to the UK, I had no idea.

I do hope the sister had been honest that she has always planned to return full time when her kid is in school.

Afaik It is a recent enough change, maybe 5 years, there is a shortage of teachers.
My DD is 17, it wasn’t a common thing when she was in primary school. It is a supply and demand, if they want to keep teachers they have to move with the times and allow family too.
There are plenty of jobs that you can’t do PT. Teaching was one of them.
Apologies to the teachers on here, ready to jump on me.

It's not a matter of being honest. Sometimes people don't know or their circumstances change. OP has said her sister is returning earlier than expected due to her husbands health issues.

My children are 30 and 28 and both had years when their teachers job shared and it worked very well. It's also a good thing to help minimise a class being stuck with a lazy or poor performing teacher for a year when the other teacher can be a safety net.

Most children are pretty good at adapting especially if parents don't make a big deal out of it.

Ultimately it’s like any fixed term contract. In England if I took one on as a maternity cover I could hope they don’t come back but it’s not my right to the job

Yes essentially 👍

It's not a ridiculous comment - it's an observation based on several decades of life experience. Middle-class kids have plenty of role models in the teaching profession - working-class kids do not - that's reality. Most of the teachers teaching in working class areas did not grow up there - they get in their cars at the end of the day and drive to nice middle-class areas.

I'm not the only person to have gone through the education system without meeting a single teacher from the same background as myself. Most of the teachers I had actively despised working-class children and all of them lived in places like Leopardstown, Terenure or Rathfarnham.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers at the moment is the cost of accommodation in Dublin which is much less of an issue for newly qualified teachers who come from Dublin who live at home. It's a much bigger issue for teachers moving to Dublin from the country. Last year alone, there were 3,500 teachers on "leave of absence" many shortly after getting a permanent role who then have to be replaced with temporary teachers hired on short-term contracts which is not in the interest of the children in those schools. The whole leave of absence option is a scam - it doesn't exist in the private sector and with so much shortage of teachers (despite universities pumping more and more out every year) it should be abolished altogether.

The bottom line is that working-class children deserve and need teachers from their own communities. Ditto for Travellers and for foreign nationals.
Everyone needs role models.

In relation to the Gardai, I'd love to know where all the Dublin born Guards have been hiding throughout my lifetime.

She will have taken the job on as temporary knowing that it would only be for a set amount of time. A bit like maternity cover.