Clarke and the Irish Independent

The Press Ombudsman has decided to uphold a complaint by Ms Maeve Clarke that an article in the Irish Independent on 17 September 2011 about the findings of an OECD Report on teachers’ pay and conditions breached Principle 1 (Truth and Accuracy) of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines because it stated inaccurately that the number of hours worked by Irish secondary teachers was “significantly lower” than the OECD average.

The Report concerned is almost 500 pages long and contains detailed statistical analyses of the trends in teachers’ pay and conditions in OECD countries. It records the most recent figures for average teaching hours in those OECD countries which supplied data for all reference years as 684 for lower secondary teachers, and 623 for upper secondary level teachers. It also records the average for Irish teachers in each of these categories as 735 hours. As the statement in the article was therefore a significant inaccuracy, the complaint is upheld.

The Press Ombudsman decided that an offer by the newspaper to publish a letter from the complainant was a sufficient offer on its part to resolve another complaint about the article, and he decided not to uphold two further complaints about the article.

While Ms Clarke also complained about the accuracy of a statement in the article that Irish teachers’ salaries were “among the highest in the world”, the Report provides evidence that the statement about teachers’ salaries to which the complainant objected was to some degree qualified by other relativities – as were the statements about teachers’ salaries in the other countries studied. The Press Ombudsman decided, therefore, that the newspaper’s offer to publish a letter from the complainant, although this was not made until some four weeks after the receipt of the complaint, was sufficient remedial action on its part to resolve this part of the complaint.

A complaint about a reference in the article to teachers who get married being entitled to “an extra seven days to facilitate the wedding” was not upheld, since the Department of Education’s guidelines in relation to this leave arrangement make it clear that this entitlement relates to “seven consecutive days from the date of marriage.”

A further complaint that the article was in breach of the Code because it did not include information about the high pupil-teacher ratio in Irish schools was not upheld as the article concerned, while it might be open to criticism because of this omission, did not purport to be a summary of the entire Report concerned, and was a legitimate expression of the newspaper’s right to comment on an aspect of the news.

7 December 2011