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EDUCATION MINISTER HELEN McEntee claimed on 22 April that there are more teachers in Ireland than ever.
In an interview on RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland programme, McEntee was asked what she was going to do about staffing shortages in schools, a situation that teacher unions have described as a crisis.
But is her claim accurate?
On 22 April, Minister for Education Helen McEntee said that there were more teachers in Ireland than ever before.
Touting her department’s efforts to add to the number of teachers in the country, McEntee said:
“It’s important to say that we have more teachers than ever before. About 20% more people have registered with the Teaching Council in recent years.”
McEntee added that she was very aware that the country still needs more teachers, and outlined steps her department has taken to entice qualified teachers back home to Ireland and fast-track permanent contracts for new teachers.
There are two sources for numbers of teachers in Ireland: The Teaching Council, which McEntee referenced on Morning Ireland, and the Department of Education.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has data regarding the number of people employed under the category “Teaching and educational professionals”, which is too broad to use in assessing McEntee’s claim because it includes people working outside of primary and secondary schools.
According to the Teaching Council, there are currently 126,821 teachers registered in Ireland, which is a record high, according to the council itself.
However, that figure is not an accurate representation of the number of teachers working in the country because it includes student teachers – who are not fully qualified and work part-time – and further education teachers who do not work in primary or secondary schools.
Also, some teachers may be registered in more than one category at the same time, like primary and secondary, for example. This means they appear more than once on the register.
The Teaching Council told The Journal: “Once a teacher is registered with the Teaching Council, they may seek employment as a teacher. Registered teachers may also decide to work outside of Ireland or may decide not to work as a teacher.”
The Teaching Council is the regulator of the teaching profession in Ireland and has no role in recruitment.
Following a request for information that would support McEntee’s claim, the Department of Education provided more pertinent data.
A spokesperson for the Department told The Journal that, according to recent analysis of payroll data, “there are over 79,390 qualified teachers employed in our schools across the country with 43,163 at primary level including special schools and over 36,227 in post-primary schools”.
That is roughly 50,000 fewer than the number registered with the Teaching Council.
The number of employed teachers in primary and secondary schools has risen steadily over the past decade.
In 2014 (the earliest date for which the Department provides data), 58,068 teachers were employed in Ireland. By 2020, the number had risen to 69,221.
The Department also pointed out that the number of teaching posts has grown in recent years, which can go some way towards explaining how the number of teachers can grow at the same time as the number of unfilled posts also rises.
“Between 2018/19 and the last school year 2023/24, through record investment by Government, the number of teaching posts has increased by 10,408 with 5,339 (14.3%) primary, and 5,069 (17.8%) post-primary allocated teaching posts,” a spokesperson said.
The growing number of teaching posts can be put down to demand.
According to the CSO, primary school enrolments increased by 6% between 2012/13 and 2022/23, while secondary enrolments rose by 12% in the same period.
McEntee’s claim was made in the context of an ongoing recruitment and retention crisis in Irish schools.
According to an Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) survey of 40% of primary and special schools, published in October 2024, 29% of those schools said they had unfilled positions.
Among those schools, the INTO found there were 951 unfilled full-time teaching positions, and schools said they expected to have another 1,816 vacancies by January of this year.
A separate survey by the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) from August 2024 found that 82% of second-level schools had no applications for an advertised post or posts during the 2023/24 school year.
The ASTI survey also found that 87% of schools said there were no substitute teachers available to cover for absences, and 77% said they had to employ unqualified or casual teachers to fill vacancies.
Minister for Education Helen McEntee said that there were more teachers in Ireland than ever before.
She made her claim with reference to record high Teaching Council registration figures, which are not an accurate reflection of the number of primary and secondary school teachers currently employed.
The Department of Education provided information regarding the number of teachers employed between 2014 and the present, which omits a significant amount of time since the foundation of the State.
Those figures show that the number of employed teachers has increased consistently over the last decade and reached a high this year at 79,390.
We therefore rate the claim that there are more teachers than ever before to be MOSTLY TRUE.
As per our verdict guide, this means the claim is close to accurate, but is missing significant details or context. Or, the best available evidence weighs in favour of the claim.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
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