The goodwill layer

From this morning, teachers in more than three thousand Irish primary schools are working to rule. Secondary teachers are doing the same. Special needs assistants have been at it since the end of September. A full public service strike is expected on 14 October.

I am not going to write about the pay claim. Other people will do that better, and the merits of it are not what I know about.

What I want to write about is what a work-to-rule actually does, because it is one of the few instruments we have that makes an invisible thing briefly visible, and this week it is going to show us something about inclusion that we normally manage not to look at.

What gets withdrawn

A work-to-rule is not a strike. Nobody has stopped teaching. What has stopped is everything that was never written down as teaching.

Access to school buildings outside core hours. Supervision before and after school. Parent-teacher meetings moved inside the school day. In the secondary directive, responding to phone calls and emails. In the SNA directive, among other things, training and student planning meetings.

Read that list again, slowly, and think about a specific child.

Think about the autistic eleven-year-old who cannot do the schoolyard at 8.40am and has, by quiet arrangement, been coming in the side door at 8.35 to sit in the classroom while the teacher sets up. That arrangement is not in any policy. It is not funded. It does not appear on a timetable or in a support plan. It exists because one adult noticed and said come on in.

Think about the parent who cannot do a 7pm parent-teacher meeting because the evening routine is the only thing holding the house together, and who has instead had a ten-minute conversation at the classroom door every few weeks for two years.

Think about the planning meeting where the resource teacher, the class teacher and the SNA work out between them what next term is going to look like for a particular child - the meeting that has no slot, happens at lunchtime, and that nobody is paid for.

None of that is being withdrawn out of coldness. It is being withdrawn because a work-to-rule means doing the job as it is actually written, and when you do the job exactly as written, those things are not in it.

The part we would rather not notice

Here is the thing I keep turning over.

If the supports that hold a neurodivergent child in school can be switched off by people simply doing their contracted hours, then those supports were never structural. They were goodwill. And goodwill is not a system. It is a kindness performed repeatedly by individuals until everybody starts mistaking it for infrastructure.

I have been on both sides of this. I have been the teacher who said come on in, and I have been the parent on the receiving end of somebody else's version of it, so grateful I nearly cried in the car. And the gratitude is the tell. You do not feel grateful for things you are entitled to. You feel grateful for favours.

We have built an inclusion model in this country that runs very substantially on favours. It works - genuinely, it works, for an enormous number of children, every day - and it works because Irish schools are full of people who will do the unpaid extra bit. But a model that only functions while people are willing to work beyond their terms is a model with no load-bearing walls. It stands because everyone is holding it up.

And the first time anybody puts their arms down, you find out.

This is not an argument against the teachers

I want to be very clear, because this is the point at which this kind of piece usually goes wrong.

The answer to “the system depends on unpaid goodwill” is not “teachers should keep providing the unpaid goodwill.” That is just asking a group of people to personally subsidise a design flaw indefinitely, and then calling them uncaring when they stop. Teachers are not the fallback plan. Neither are SNAs, who are among the lowest paid people in the building and who have been carrying a disproportionate share of this for years.

It is also not an argument against industrial action. Quite the opposite. A work-to-rule is doing exactly what it is designed to do: it is showing, publicly and precisely, how much of the service depends on work nobody has ever costed.

The answer is the boring one. If a thing is necessary, write it down. Fund it. Put it in somebody's hours. Make it a duty rather than a disposition.

What this looks like designed instead of improvised

A quiet entry at 8.35 for children who cannot do a full yard is not a favour. It is a reasonable adjustment, and it costs about five minutes of a rostered supervision slot.

A conversation with a parent who cannot attend an evening meeting is not a favour. It is accessible communication, and it belongs in the school's communication policy rather than in a teacher's goodwill.

A planning meeting about a specific child is not a favour. It is the actual mechanism by which an education plan becomes a school day, and it needs a slot on a timetable with people's names in it.

None of that is radical. It is just the difference between a support that exists because of who happens to be teaching your child this year, and a support that exists because the school is built that way.

This is what I mean when I say change the environment, not the child. We spend a great deal of energy getting individual children to cope with a building, a timetable and a set of expectations that were designed around an imagined average learner - and then we patch the gap with the personal generosity of the adults in the room. Then we call the result inclusion.

Inclusion by presence is not inclusion. Neither is inclusion by goodwill. A child is not included because a kind adult made room for them. A child is included when the room was built with them in it.

This week

So: be kind to your child's school this week, and be honest with yourself about what you are seeing.

If something your child relies on quietly disappears over the next fortnight, that is useful information, and it is not a betrayal by the person who was providing it. It is the system showing you, briefly and clearly, which of your child's supports were real and which were somebody's personal decency filling a hole.

Write down what disappears. Keep the list. Because when this dispute resolves - and it will - the temptation will be to go straight back to the arrangement where everything works as long as everybody does slightly more than they are paid for.

That list is the specification for what should have been there all along.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.