BRITISH Education Secretary Alan Johnston was caught on the hop by a young Tyrone teacher this week on the subject of "golden hello" payments. These inducements, worth thousands of pounds, are used to recruit teachers of priority subjects for English schools. But not if the teachers are from here, it turns out.
The payments were pegged at up to £5,000 in the debate at the NASUWT conference in Belfast. However, a trawl of public service websites reveals that individual approved payments can be up to £14,000 and these financial inducements for teaching diplomashave recruited 41,000 trainees in the past year – many of them from here.
This highlights the wider issue of the brain drain that has been proceeding apace under direct rule by Westminster. Education policy applied in Northern Ireland sucks many of the best and the brightest from our education system. For starters, because of a too-low cap on university places here, it forces our school-leavers into universities and colleges in England, Scotland and Wales. A large percentage of those who go, particularly from the unionist side of our community, never return. Even those who remain, complete degrees here and who wish to enter the teaching profession, are then forced to look elsewhere for jobs.
Take Grainne McCay, the young teacher who confronted the British Education Minister and extracted at least a promise that he would review the situation. She would be happy to teach ICT at home in Strabane but instead is working in the south of England. There she discovered she doesn't qualify for the "golden hello" simply because she graduated from a Northern Ireland university. Had she come from any other university in the European Union – including those in Latvia, Cyprus and even the Irish Republic – she would have put a good dent in her student loan debt.
Given our enviable rate of take-up on third-level education, we have been taken for fools by our fly-by-night direct rulers. With develoved government, it is vital that our Executive ends such blatant anomalies as speedily as possible. Teachers, recent graduates and all those with knowledge and an interest in achieving the very best for our young must aid the task of halting this brain drain now.
