TEACHERS' UNION OF IRELAND:MINISTER FOR Education Ruairí Quinn has promised to examine the practice by publishing companies of frequently issuing new editions of schoolbooks amid concerns that parents are finding themselves under pressure financially to ensure their children have the latest version of texts.
Mr Quinn said the issue had been raised with him by teachers at both the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland annual conference in Cork and the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) annual congress in Tralee. He recognised there was genuine concern that it was causing hardship for families already struggling with the impact of the recession.
“I have no immediate plans to meet with the publishers but this has been raised at two trade union congresses. I’m a Labour Party member and Minister of the Government and we came here to listen, we have heard what they said, it is now a responsibility for us to look at their concerns and see what can we do about it, if we can,” he said.
Union president Bernie Ruane said she had been contacted by the St Vincent de Paul and she shared the charity’s concern that the practice of constantly issuing new editions of school texts was putting unnecessary expense on parents.
“Parents are now seeking help from St Vincent de Paul to buy schoolbooks for their children. These are not necessarily parents who are unemployed and who have medical cards. These are parents who have suddenly been hit by this recession and cannot cope with the ever-increasing price of schoolbooks,” she said.
Ms Ruane said a union survey of VEC and community and comprehensive school principals found that new editions of books are being released by publishing companies “every other year even when no syllabus change has taken place” and in many cases content has only been slightly reorganised as opposed to changed.
“Our members are reporting with increasing frequency that tactics used by publishing companies are leaving schools with little option but to use the very latest editions,” she said, instancing the case of history books where texts are constantly changing even though the events of the first World War and second World War have remained the same.
The frequent release of new books for both Junior and Leaving Cert cycles “makes it very difficult for each student in a particular class to obtain the same version of particular editions” and the use of such multiple editions is detrimental to quality teaching and learning as teachers lose time providing clarifications.
Ms Ruane said teachers believed that companies, rather than publishing new editions with worksheets and notes for online content included, should publish these separately from the main text and sell them at a much lesser charge while the main textbook could be recycled by the school, thus saving money for parents.
“Parents should be clear on what is happening – some publishers have adopted a stance that makes it almost impossible for teachers to stay with a particular edition of a textbook for any longer than one cycle and this practice should be challenged by the department by way of introducing protocols around publishing practices.
“We know that education is far from free in Ireland but the business community has a responsibility to keep costs down. Needless to say this impacts worse on the unemployed and people with large families,” said Ms Ruane as she urged publishers to be more sensitive to parents in the face of rising unemployment and lower wages.
