PPLI Audit of Foreign Languages - Flipbook - Page 37
3.1 Foreign Language Teachers in School: (Q27-31)
Unused Registered MFL Teacher Capacity
Q27: How many teachers, registered with the Teaching Council, have qualifications to teach a foreign language that
they are not currently teaching?
Question 27 asks how many teachers, registered with the Teaching Council, have qualifications to teach a foreign
language that they are not currently teaching. The majority of schools do not have teachers with qualifications in
foreign languages who are not teaching the language, and there is on average 0.8 teachers with unused foreign
language qualifications in each school; 21% of schools have one and 10% have two unused teachers in this area.
Most of these teachers are in Dublin and Cork.
French
54%
45%
German
Spanish
25%
Irish-medium schools
73%
English-medium schools
51%
55%
9%
10%
Italian
Other 0%
(please specify)
2%
0%
Russian 1%
0%
Japanese 1%
0
10% 20%
30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Figure 32: Languages of language teachers who are not currently teaching those languages
Question 28 asks about which languages they are qualified and registered to teach. Although there is some spare
language teacher capacity, realistically the two main languages with spare capacity are French and German, and as
already highlighted French is taught in virtually every school and while German is not taught in every school, it is
taught in every county. There is some spare capacity for Spanish and Italian but 29% of principals stated that the
teachers who were not teaching either a language or one of their languages were in another role; 20% stated that
it related to allocation; 16% stated that it was because it could not be fitted into the time table; and 16% stated that
it was due to insufficient numbers of students interested in taking the language.
A selection of responses to questions 29 and 30 which asked whether or not principals had considered the additional
languages that staff have as part of the curriculum and reasons if answering in the negative.
• Teacher is not permanent
• Guidance counsellor is the teacher with the German language qualification
• Not wishing to add a second language at this time
• Italian only spoken in Italy, parts of Austria, Slovenia
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Audit of Foreign Languages Provision in Post-Primary Schools 2017
Post-Primary Languages Initiative February 2017 Draft Report