Abstract
Diversifying the teaching profession has been recognised as a priority in Ireland and internationally. Despite an increasingly diverse primary school population, the Irish primary teaching profession is largely homogenous in nature. This research, informed by Critical Race Theory, explored the experiences of teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds in primary education. It examines how the institutional habitus of Irish primary schools can contribute to racial trauma and marginalisation for minority teachers. Findings reveal the value of teacher diversity in promoting culturally responsive practices and challenging racial injustice in their schools and broader society. Their advocacy takes place within school contexts that can devalue their knowledges and perspectives. This research offers a unique perspective into questions of discrimination within the Irish primary teaching profession, and points to further systemic and institutional barriers and practices that can contribute to the alienation of minority teachers and concludes with implications for current practices and policy.
Introduction
As in many jurisdictions, anti-migrant sentiment in Ireland has seen a notable increase driven by a combination of factors including, rising immigration, economic pressures, and a widescale housing crisis. Ireland has experienced a general increase in immigration over the last several years, with increased numbers of asylum seekers and refugees in recent times, 1 including those fleeing conflicts. The influx of migrants in Ireland, including those seeking asylum, is reflective of broader trends across the EU, where latest available statistics from Eurostat indicate that approximately 4.3 million people immigrated to the EU from non-EU countries in 2023. It is important to note however that this is a decrease of approximately 18% compared to 2022 and the rate of migration between EU countries is around 1.5 million. 2 Despite the recent indices indicating a downward turn in immigration to Europe in general, and Ireland specifically, there have been no concomitant deflations of anti-migrant sentiments amid a globally fractious milieu with ongoing conflicts, genocide and hardening of far-right identity politics. Within the political milieu of authoritarian neoliberalism (Saidel, 2023), or what some have described as neoliberal fascism (Giroux, 2018), some sections of society, including those who are in more vulnerable socio-economic positions, have developed a deep resentment resulting in ‘apathetic withdrawal or in xenophobia’ (Dardot et al., 2019: 5), often targeting migrants and other minorities across European contexts. These trends have been accompanied by the flocking of significant numbers of the public to emerging right-wing political parties amid a nativist divide across Western Europe (Kokkonen and Linde, 2023) which constructs antagonistic binaries between presumed national identities and those deemed ‘other’.
Ireland has not escaped such right-wing emergences and associated public displays of violence (symbolic and physical) towards migrants and ethnic minorities such as large-scale gatherings of anti-immigration groups in response to anti-racism protests in Dublin last year (The Irish Times, 2025). Ireland is somewhat unique in the European context, historically lacking significant right-wing official political parties that have either been in government or impacted public policies. However, as Garner (2007) has excavated, there has always existed a core undercurrent of centre-right populist mobilisation among mainstream parties in Ireland, epitomised in the 2004 Citizenship referendum which established the primacy of the jus sanguinis path to Irishness, where non-national parents with an Irish born child were no longer automatically entitled to citizenship, had a period of 3 years in which to establish their right to citizenship, and if unsuccessful, effectively disqualified the Irish-born child from from this same right. Lentin (2004) argues that the referendum constitutes the shift of the Irish state from ‘racial’ to ‘racist’, constructing a racialised conception of Irishness – itself an ongoing phenomenon of postcolonial independence and nationalist desire. The point in raising this state development for Ireland here is partly to explain the preponderance of anti-migrant sentiment as linked to the racialised construction of Irishness dominant in public policy, following independence from Britain. It is also intended to showcase the centrality of nativist ideologies, typically associated with the far-right elsewhere in Europe, despite a lack of mainstream right-wing political party coming to power in Ireland’s national history. Indeed, in Ireland the predominant political parties’ right-leaning conservative politics have been aptly suited to sustain the ideological labour of far-right parties observed elsewhere (Garner, 2007).
Consequentially, ideologies and intolerances consistent with anti-migrant antipathy have been an inherent undercurrent within official politics and policy, as well as within the public sphere, transgressing stereotypic racist binaries of white/non-white bodies. Those Irish who do not conform to the normative construct of ‘Irishness’, (i.e. white, Irish born, settled and English speaking) have also found themselves subject to discrimination. Irish Travellers, as a minority ethnic group, have endured a long history of racial discrimination and marginalisation that persists today (Mac Laughlin, 1996). The unceasing discrimination of Travellers in the Irish context reflects the manner in which the construction of Irish national identity, as an ongoing racial project within official discourses, has always worked to exclude, silence, and discriminate beyond typical white/non-white binaries, preceding the era of significant immigration (Kitching, 2010). Nevertheless, this does not preclude the workings of racist politics – both official and unofficial – encompassing other forms of discrimination based on white/non-white, gendered, sexed, heteronormative, or religious grounds in contemporary Ireland, finding commonalities with other European contexts. Relatedly, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights report (2023) found that 55% of those of African descent living in Ireland experienced racial discrimination in the 5-year period from 2017 to 2022. It also reported that black children in Ireland faced the highest levels of bullying, racial insults, and physical attacks across the European states surveyed, while black Africans here faced greater discrimination in housing and employment than in most other states. The Irish Network Against Racism national report (INAR 2022) found that the incidence of racially motivated offences has increased significantly. Therefore, discussions regarding the need to diversify the teaching profession, and indeed broader society, are taking place amidst broader movements hostile to attempts to promote inclusion of heterogenous forms of minoritised groups.
Against this backdrop, in Ireland, the government’s National Action Plan Against Racism (NAPAR; Government of Ireland, 2023) was launched. This document was ambitious in its scope, proposing targeted measures to address racism on institutional and structural levels, and setting ‘a vision of an inclusive and purposefully antiracist republic, which cherishes all who live here equally. . . a society in which the existence and impacts of racism are acknowledged, and all sectors work to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms’. The NAPAR has as one of its main objectives to address ethnic inequalities ‘including in employment, education, health and housing’. Within education, it highlights the need to ‘take steps to strengthen inclusion and anti-racism at all levels of the education system’. (p. 20). This paper will reflect on how the experiences of minority teachers offer an insight into how the Irish Primary school system is placed to achieve these ambitions especially considering the mainstream racism replete within Ireland’s politics and public policy concerning issues related to minorities. We will begin with a review of the exiting literature focussing on the rationale for diversity in the Irish teaching profession and will consider whether increasing the supply of minority teachers is sufficient to achieve this goal. Following this the paper will introduce our theoretical framing informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) that seeks to trouble neoliberal constructions of diversity, premised on notions of viability, before moving into the details of the empirical approach we implemented.
‘Mind the gap’, the demographic deficit and the rationale for a diverse teaching staff
While Irish society has become more diverse in composition (Central Statistics Office [CSO], 2023; 2016) with a commensurate increasingly diverse student population (Donlevy et al., 2016; Santoro, 2015), the Irish teaching profession at primary level has not reflected these societal demographic changes. The dominant ethnic group in Ireland; White, Irish-born, Settled, and Catholic, is significantly overrepresented in the primary teaching profession (Devine, 2005; Heinz and Keane, 2018; Hyland, 2012). The over-representation of those from the dominant ethnic group also persists in other European contexts, despite initiatives that attempt to increase minorities representation in education (Heinz and Keane, 2018; Ingersoll et al., 2019; Schmidt et al., 2016). A pan-European study from the European Commission (2016) reports that in general across the European context, there is a trend of national teaching profession demographics comprising predominately national identities with a minimal representation of ethnic minorities. Therefore, Ireland’s context is quite similar to other European states in this regard.
Policies to promote entry pathways to minority ethnic students on teacher education programmes have been implemented across several countries in Europe. In Ireland, the 2015–2019 National Plan for Equity of Access to Higher Education (Higher Education Authority [HEA], 2015) states ambitions to increase recruitment to teacher education from these groups. Notably, references to these targeted groups do not explicitly name those from minority ethnic backgrounds, except for the mention of Travellers, focussing instead on a general moniker of ‘socio-economic disadvantage’ (Keane et al., 2022a). This is somewhat addressed in the more recent access plan covering 2022–2028 (HEA, 2022), with a special mention of the importance of teacher diversity ‘with research showing that teachers from similar backgrounds have positive effects on ethnic minority students and low-income students’ (p. 21). As critiqued by Keane et al. (2022b), the focus on socioeconomic disadvantage above other dimensions of diversity can be problematic as it works to silence the impact of racism (Kitching, 2015a), presenting a significant barrier in a predominantly white education system. This issue is also reflected in the research illustrating the various challenges faced by minority ethnic students in education.
Students from minority backgrounds have been found to experience negative educational experiences, resulting in poorer outcomes (Darmody and Smyth, 2018; Donlevy et al., 2016). Recent research from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Ireland has reported that children from a migrant background (with at least one migrant parent) have a higher level of representation in Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) schools, 3 are ranked in lower percentiles for English language achievement when both parents are non-English speaking natives, and tend to demonstrate lower self-concept (Darmody et al., 2022). These trends of underachievement are also reflected among Irish Traveller pupils attending school, where they generally perform lower than their settled peers in mathematics and reading (McGinley and Keane, 2022). Research has pointed to a lack of diversity in the teaching profession as a contributing factor to this ‘achievement gap’ and other negative outcomes for minority students (Glock and Kleen, 2019), motivating the rationale behind the inclusion of teacher diversity as a target in the national access plan.
Previous research has demonstrated that the presence of teachers from minority backgrounds can mitigate some negative educational experiences within the school setting, leading to improved outcomes for minority students both with and without direct matching of teacher to students (Rocha and Hawes, 2009; Villegas and Irvine, 2010), and through positive influence on school practices (Pitts, 2007; Plachowski, 2019). A teaching profession that is reflective of the diversity within society can offer a protective quality against taken-for-granted norms that exist within the institutional habitus of the school system, promoting school practices that are more cognisant of the experiences of students from minoritised backgrounds (Burns Thomas, 2020; Picower, 2009). As opposed to their majority colleagues, minority teachers’ personal experiences of structural and institutional inequalities can foster greater motivations to support their students from culturally and linguistically diverse sections of society (Magaldi et al., 2018). Their appreciation of the experiences and perspectives of their students can contribute to their adoption of practices and approaches that acknowledge the experiences. (Burns et al., 2022; Santoro, 2015). Quiocho and Rios (2000) argued that the delivery of culturally relevant pedagogy is intrinsic to minority teachers due to their inherent cultural understanding of the needs and perspectives of their students, which are often not shared by teachers drawn from the dominant ethnic group (Amos, 2010). While debates circulate questioning the assumption that all minority teachers possess an innate understanding of the needs of their minority students (Goodwin and Keane, 2023; Hopson, 2014; Rezai-Rashti and Martino, 2010), and we certainly do not engage in any essentialisms our work here, there appears to be a broad acceptance that teachers from minority backgrounds do bring certain competencies and perspectives that make their adoption of culturally responsive practices more likely (Quiocho and Rios, 2000), reflecting core advantages of plurality. There has been a relative lack of research in this area in the Irish context, which is perhaps unsurprising given the low numbers of serving minority ethnic teachers. What research that has taken place described how minority teachers displayed a sensitivity to the needs of minoritised students and were motivated to support them within the school environment (Burns et al., 2023; Keane et al., 2022a).
While much of the discourse around minoritised teachers refer to their positive influence on experiences of their minority students, their presence can also lead to better educational experiences for all by offering diverse perspectives in their practice and to prepare all students to engage in increasingly diverse societies (Plachowski, 2019; Santoro, 2015). The presence of teachers from minority backgrounds has been identified as important from a broader societal perspective, describing how a teaching body that is populated by the majority (White) ethnic group is problematic in the way that it serves to reinforce dominant ideologies which can replicate existing inequalities within society (Picower, 2009). Greater contact with teachers from minority backgrounds can be important for their ‘symbolic significance’ (Schmidt et al., 2016: xiii) countering negative stereotypes majority students may have developed about minority ethnic groups (Nevarez et al., 2019; Villegas et al., 2012). Schmidt asserts the benefits for broader society; ‘A diversity of backgrounds and perspectives among staff enriches all school communities’ (Schmidt, 2015: 586). The importance of this plural presence within the school environment is stressed by Ladson Billings in a commentary in Education Week (2018) regarding the need for greater representation of Black teachers in the US, I want to suggest that there is something that may be even more important than Black students having Black teachers and that is White students having Black teachers. It is important for White students to encounter Black people who are knowledgeable and hold some level of authority over them. . . what opportunities do White students have to see and experience Black competence?
While presence of minority teachers can challenge assumptions regarding racial-ethnic inferiority and deficit, it should be recognised that their mere presence is not enough to challenge these assumptions. Minority teachers may act in ways that reinforce inequality and may assimilate to the prevailing (majority dominated) habitus of the school culture (Marom, 2019), reflecting the systemic nature of racism and the associated valorisation of liberal individualism within the ongoing neo liberalisation of education (Delahunty, 2025).
The prize of diversity’ – a question of supply?
The prevailing policy and practice of the Irish Government, as in other jurisdictions (e.g. Donlevy et al., 2016; Terhart and Rosen, 2022), has been to support those from minority groups in their path into the teaching profession, primarily via funding routes into initial teacher education (ITE). Initiatives in the Irish context have had success in supporting those from underrepresented groups entering the primary teaching profession such as, through Programmes for Access to Higher Education (PATH1; see Burns et al., 2022; McDaid, 2022). While obstacles to entering ITE can vary depending upon the national context, many common challenges exist, including academic experiences, economic disadvantage and broader structural and institutional barriers (Donlevy et al., 2016). Further barriers exist that are specific to the Irish context, including, for example, the necessity to satisfy the Irish Language Requirement 4 (ILR), a condition which can favour those who are of the majority ethnic group and may be of particular concern to many migrant teachers who may be restricted in the settings they can teach (Mc Daid and Nowlan, 2022). The requirement to complete the ILR within a 3-year time frame contributes to continued insecurity for many minority teachers, limiting the positions they can fill in their search for secure employment. These teachers must also navigate the still predominantly Catholic denominational patronage of Irish primary schools (Coolahan et al., 2012), where potential teachers from minority faiths must overcome institutional and legal privileging of those from the majority catholic group when seeking to gain secure employment (Heinz et al., 2018; McDaid, 2022). A provision in the Employment Equality Act (Department of Justice 1998–2011) permits positive discrimination in schools by allowing more favourable treatment of employees or prospective employees on the grounds of religion, thus privileging those of the majority faith over teachers from minority religious backgrounds.
While initiatives to support prospective teachers from historically underrepresented groups in their entry into teaching is an important aspect of this discussion, consideration must also be given to their experience upon entry to the professional context of Irish primary schools, especially considering the historical and contemporaneous political ruptures in this context. To be clear, initiatives that challenge barriers to entry are necessary, but as we argue, alone are insufficient to address the larger issues of inequality permeating contemporary education, and the teaching profession specifically. For instance, international research has pointed to the challenges that minority teachers encounter navigating school contexts overwhelmingly populated by the dominant cultural/ethnic group (Marom, 2019). Often, the established cultural norms of the school contributes to a sense of invalidation of minority teachers’ identities, where they encounter pressure to assimilate to the expectations of their institutions (Hernández-Johnson et al., 2023; Pizarro and Kohli, 2020). Minority teachers have also reported their need to challenge overt and covert racism within their workplace. Their perspectives and their advocacy often placed them in a role of being antagonistic to school leadership (Bradbury et al., 2023). To this end, questions of equity within primary school are an important consideration in addition to equity of access.
Present work: Troubling constructions of ‘viable diversity’ through CRT
While official discourses and policy continue to push for reform in the name of greater levels of diversity in the teaching profession, predominantly through access pathways, these narratives must be situated within the broader sociopolitics of managing diversity within contemporary Ireland, along with the increasing neo liberalisation of education. This section presents our theoretical approach, informed by CRT, and briefly discusses previous work that has troubled the policy manifestations of multiculturalism and diversity within the neoliberal era of education in the Irish context. Drawing upon CRT centres racism as a structuring pillar of capitalist society that not only fails to recognise the experiences of those from minority backgrounds, but which works to reinforce inequalities and preserve ‘white’ interests (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; Gillborn, 2006). CRT evades simple classification within a singular definition but there are certain agreements as to the core tenets of its theoretical framework among authoritative scholars in this field 5 (Dixson and Rousseau Anderson, 2018; Gillborn, 2014, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2005; Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Tate, 1997). These include the endemic and ‘normal’ nature of racism (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002), a focus on intersectionality (Gillborn, 2015), narrative and counter-narrative accounts of minority perspectives (Ladson-Billings, 2005), and commitment to resistance and radical change (Crewe, 2021). Importantly, as outlined by Gillborn (2015: p. 21), ‘the treatment of white supremacy as the ‘operation of much more subtle and extensive forces that saturate the everyday mundane actions and policies’, as opposed to the stereotypical neo-Nazi or fascist images the term conjures, is critical in unveiling and challenging the racism and inequity situated within mainstream education, which do not fall within obvious crude acts. While originating in the US context, the adoption of CRT transnationally has raised several debates (Hylton et al., 2011; Warmington, 2012), which have highlighted tensions and concerns in adoption. And while CRT satisfies all the core requirements of a theory it is perhaps useful in this context to emphasise its ‘living’ nature where its ideas and approaches remain responsive to the evolving complexities of racism within contemporary challenges raised by various global ruptures (Gillborn, 2024). Extending this sentiment, the adoption of CRT, as Kitching (2015b) emphasises, remaining true to its radically praxis-oriented nature must be animated in specific contexts of racial formation. In the case of Ireland, amid a historical set of praxes encompassing both colonial and post-colonial transitions, this orientation centres both the colonial racializing of the Irish people – albeit in a unique, not exactly white, manner compared to other colonies of the British empire (Mac an Ghaill, 2002) – and the post-colonial independence state formation elevating Irish nationalism and the evolving racial constructions of Irishness into the era of neoliberal capitalism. We draw upon these perspectives not to forward some essentialised conception of the Irish or romantic notion of an anti-colonial liberation, but to emphasise the shifting and fluid constructions of Irishness within various historical and contemporary mainstream movements and its potential for engaging racist praxes of discrimination. We have already explored the shit from racial to ‘racist’ politics of state governance earlier in the paper, which informed by our ‘Greened’ CRT reading (Kitching, 2015b), demonstrates the state apparatuses’ construction of a sub-altern immigrant class through supposedly rational-neutral policy mechanisms. In following the work of Kitching (2015b) we therefore tread cautiously in our adoption of CRT, particularly emphasising a Greened adoption, which problematises constructions of Irishness as a racialised category that seeks to silence or restrict those outside of this frame, upheld by various systemic and institutional technologies. In this adoption, therefore, we reject the myth of liberal anti-racist progress and the supposed objective neutrality of both neoliberal policy solutions aiming instead to elevate the counter-narratives of minority teachers to expose the ability of the educational system in Ireland, and the modern primary teaching profession in particular, to exclude or repress.
Reading the upsurge of incentivisation for diversifying the teaching profession against the backdrop of over two decades of various policy discourses on managing diversity in Irish society and education reveals several potential areas of concern. These include the ongoing intensification of neoliberal politics in education across Europe and Ireland that have promulgated liberal individualism and economic rationality as the basis for egalitarian discourses of multiculturalism and diversity (Lentin and Titley, 2011), and which work to surreptitiously reproduce power relations in society (Hage, 1998) through a politics of recognition (Baca, 2005). Within this extractive set of politics, as Ahmed (2007) argues, diversity can be ‘cut off’ from a systematic focus which aims to challenges inequalities in structural, and by implication, material forms. The term diversity in this context ‘is a sign of the lack of commitment to [systemic] change’ (ibid: 236).
Although policies relating to diversity are represented in egalitarian discourses, diverse bodies of research from the Irish context have demonstrated the framing of policy which privileges white majority interests through, for example, a ‘corporate multiculturalism’ that primarily values diversity for economic contributions (Bryan, 2010). This corporate valuing of diversity is also evident within recent educational policy relating to language education, where the prioritising of increasingly diverse languages curriculum is envisaged as a platform to access increasing share of international markets (Delahunty, 2025), evincing the continued extractive politics of viability, long associated with the management of diversity in Irish policy (Kitching, 2010). With these trends in mind, rendered clear with the concept of interest-convergence from CRT, the presentation of advantages associated with diversifying the teaching profession – such as the positive impact of minority teachers on minority students stated in recent policy and reviewed earlier in this paper – must be read critically and within scope of racial neoliberalism and its associated politics of diversity. As Lentin and Titley (2011: p. 183) persuasively analyse, the politics of diversity effects a managerial, and institutionally supported, implementation of diversity with the aim of ‘integration governance’. Within these practices, an array of differences are harmonised and collapsed into a coherent whole, diverting from the systemic racisms core to a functioning neoliberalist society, where diversity is in effect defined in ways that maintain white interests and social privileges (Ahmed, 2007). The extractive logics of racial neoliberalism supports the potential for a denial of a genuine diversification in the teaching profession, extending beyond issues of access to material and systemic levels. This framing of policy within the politics of diversity, whereby diversity is ostensibly elevated and celebrated, hides the practices of benevolent tolerance elided within, where the recogniser (the white majority) has the power to recognise, thereby reproducing a hierarchical relationship that denies the possibility of constructing a truly diverse collective social identity (Bryan, 2009; Hage, 1998). In other words, there is a potential ‘othering’ occurring in the signalling of the term diversity and its associated benefits for the teaching profession, where the minority teacher – and the benefits for minority students – are positioned separately and disconnected from, but ultimately serving the interests of the white majority; always constructed as inferiorly different (Bryan, 2010; Hage, 1998; Lentin and Titley, 2011). Therefore, the focus on diversifying the profession must subsequently explore experiences within the world of the minority teacher as well, which is the core focus of our approach in this research, outlined in the next section.
Methods and materials
Our objective was to uncover the counter-narratives of minority voices within the primary teaching profession embedded within the professional context of schooling and within an policy era motivated around issues of diversification. Underlying meanings embedded in these narratives offer insights into the broader socio-cultural context of participants located within the material context of professional schooling. Recognition of the researchers’ positionality as members of the majority group – white male researchers and qualified teachers – and its effect on the interpretation of participants’ accounts was critical. Failure to acknowledge this positionality would perpetuate the standardised (non)treatment of whiteness as a racialised component of mainstream academic research (Phillippo and Nolan, 2024), contributing to the maintenance of white privilege (Bhopal, 2018). This acknowledgement is particularly important in the context of a majority white teaching profession and the preponderance of pedagogies of whiteness replete within teaching and teacher education (Picower, 2009). The authors cannot remove themselves from this context, within their own teacher education journeys, nor from the fact that the centrality of racism in neoliberal society has benefitted them in their individual histories. However, we do follow the lead of scholars such as Leonardo (2004), who argue that the necessity to dismantle systems of white privilege and the associated oppression of minorities, do not fall solely on peoples who did not construct these systems. We also argue, as have others (e.g. Gillborn et al., 2023), the need to move beyond our own introspections in ‘hacking at the very roots’ of our own privileges (Aveling, 2006) in order to engage, albeit with necessary discomfort (Hobson and Whigham, 2018), the task of challenging systemic whiteness in the Irish education system. While Ireland can be viewed within the perspective of a post-colonial nation, acknowledging the historical racialisation of Irish subjectivities as non-white under colonial rule, along with the attendant exigencies of civilising discourses (McVeigh and Rolston, 2009), we do not shy away from centring independent Ireland’s aggressive modernising project and pursuit of Atlantic-European citizenship or the heterogenous and sliding significations of race in Irish nationhood across time and space (Ghaill, 2002; Kitching, 2015b). Nor do we divert from the centrality of racism in the institution of Irish education and associated policy, in line with our CRT informed approach.
In practice this necessitated a careful approach to data collection, where just one of us engaged in the facilitation of semi-structured interviews with participants; we describe this next.
Data collection
A semi-structured interview was chosen as the tool to best explore participants’ experiences and perspectives (DeJonckheere and Vaughn, 2019; Kallio et al., 2016). Dialogic interviews were favoured as they offered greater freedom to participants to discuss questions of a sensitive nature that may not have been shared in wider group discussions (Galletta, 2013) and did not offer the same implications regarding questions of participant confidentiality (Sim and Waterfield, 2019). Once consent had been obtained participants were offered the choice of being interviewed in person or via an online platform. This was essential in relation to the researchers’ positionality as it offered the control of interview context to the participants and the chance to undertake the conversation outside the bounds of institutional materialities that may inadvertently impose pedagogies of whiteness on the part of the interviewer or the complex of the educational system (Sriprakash et al., 2022). Having a one-on-one format was deemed a sensitive approach so that the participants were not confronted by two members of the majority population, which in addition to potentially discomforting the participant, would risk reaffirming the norm of white privilege and create barriers to the emergence of counternarrative experiences through a CRT lens. Interviews took between 1 and 2.5 hours to complete. While the interview was intended to be between 1 and 1.5 hours, participants dictated the duration of interviews, while longer interviews facilitated deeper examination of the research topic. Member checking was also employed to enhance the trustworthiness of the data (Creswell and Poth, 2018). Participants were invited to review interpretations to enhance their trustworthiness and include them in the co-construction of the research findings (Nowell et al., 2017). This also guarded against the researchers’ own potential, notwithstanding inadvertency, to misrepresent or ‘whitewash’ any data.
Participants and sampling
Purposive sampling was chosen to select participants. Participant recruitment was challenging due to the limited number of potential participants in Irish Primary schools. In this case, seven fully qualified primary school teachers were selected to participate in this study as they were the best placed to inform the research questions (Cohen et al., 2018; Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). Research participants came from a relatively diverse range of the ethnicities within the Irish teaching profession. Certain minority ethnicities/minority faiths were not available for this research; however, we hope that this may change in future research as initiatives to increase the diversity of the teaching profession continue.
The characteristics of research participants are described in Table 1. Five of those who participated in the study were migrant teachers (MTs) who obtained their qualifications in jurisdictions outside of Ireland. Three of these participants had not yet satisfied all of the conditions of accreditation with the Teaching Council, specifically the ILR. Three of the study participants were in permanent positions in their current schools, while others were in less secure positions, acting in a fixed-term capacity or as non-casual substitute teachers. Participants had experience working in various roles in their schools, including learning support, English as an Additional Language (EAL) positions and mainstream class positions. One participant was a school leader. Two of the study participants completed their ITE in Ireland. One identified as an Irish born ethnic/religious minority, while one identified as Nigerian Irish. One participant did not wish their region of origin to be disclosed due to concerns regarding anonymity.
Summary of the study participants.
Ethical considerations
Ethical approval for the study was obtained prior to recruitment. Potential participants were provided with all relevant information about the study, thus offering them the opportunity to weigh up the risks and benefits of involvement prior to participation and informed consent was obtained. All participants were also informed of their right to withdraw from the study at any stage and were provided with information as to how their data and anonymity would be protected.
After each interview was conducted, the recorded data were repeatedly listened to and transcribed verbatim. Initially, the data were read several times in order to become familiar with the richness within and the initial patterns that could be identified (Braun and Clarke, 2022). The data were analysed in a way that allowed the researchers to interpret the participants’ accounts of their experiences, paying particular attention to the theoretical perspective of CRT. Reflexive Thematic Analysis was adopted due to its flexible procedures as well as its conduciveness to providing descriptions of data with depth and insight (Braun and Clarke, 2022; Nowell et al., 2017). The data were coded inductively, and similar codes were organised together to form themes (Braun and Clarke, 2022; Nowell et al., 2017). Braun and Clarke’s (2022 procedures for thematic analysis were adopted which involved, respectively, (1) Becoming familiar with the data through in-depth reading and re-reading; (2) Coding transcripts, initially line by line, followed by (3) synthesising appropriate themes in an iterative manner; (4) Reviewing these initial themes and combining/collapsing codes further where appropriate; (5) Refining these themes and sub-themes along with associated interconnections; (6) Writing the report where data and themes are appropriately communicated in line with our CRT framing.
Findings and analysis
The experience of the ‘space invader’ – The outsider in education
Research participants were aware of their position outside of the normative construct of the ‘typical’ Irish teacher. While the majority of participants spoke positively of their experiences within schools, they remained aware of their ‘outsider’ status.
I remember, in the early days someone said ‘Oh my God. It’s just great to have someone like you here’. . .she probably meant it in a complementary way. But at the same time, it kind of makes you feel like, ‘Oh my God, are you from Mars and how did you even become a teacher? Because they don’t look like you.
Participants’ presence, while welcomed, was nonetheless greeted with a reminder of how they were not congruent with the somatic norm (of whiteness) of their schools (Puwar, 2004). Fiona’s account illustrates how well-meaning comments by those from the dominant culture can result in those from minority backgrounds being ‘othered’ in their professional lives (Lander and Santoro, 2017; Picower, 2009).
Those participants who did fit the image of the stereotypical teacher remained aware of their non-majority status. Even those who presented as the ‘typical teacher’ remained conscious of their outsider status.
‘I’m a middle-aged white woman. So, when I walk into a school and I walk past you, you would not even look twice at me. . . It’s only when I open my mouth that you might go. ‘Oh, wow, that’s strange. That was a different sound that came out of there. I wasn’t expecting that.’
Brenda’s perception of her position as ‘other’ spoke to how participants’ identities were defined by more than physical appearance, but also comprised ethnic, cultural and linguistic aspects. Their awareness of their non-typical ethno-cultural background illustrates how those from minority backgrounds experience the dominant culture as an underlying feature of the school system, as observed by Bradbury et al. (2023). Teachers not only had a way to look, but an expected way to speak, or indeed to teach (Marom, 2019). In this way, these experiences demonstrate not only the centrality of whiteness within a CRT-informed analytic, but consequently how these norms function to shape minority teachers’ professional subjectivities to the detriment of their personal identities. Considered through this lens, those who did not share the characteristics and traits of the dominant group in teaching were conscious of their position and an element of subordination. Drawing from CRT, and in contrast to the principle of interest-convergence, these data can be said to showcase the converse of interest-divergence (Guinier, 2004) where the milieu of the school and educational system structure an ordering effectively dismissing the backgrounds of diverse teachers.
The value of the outsider; questioning the hegemonic norm
Participants’ accounts suggested that their position as ‘outsider’ shaped their experiences and perceptions of their schools, potentially troubling hitherto unproblematic school practices: I think being an outsider generally can be a lonely place, but it can be a very valuable place to be because you see things a little bit differently . . . When you see the normal as not normal, I think that’s quite a helpful thing.
Participants’ narratives suggested that their colleagues did not display similar cultural awareness and had no need to question the dominant cultural norms within their school (Mc Daid and Nowlan, 2022), also reflecting the ‘non-fact’ of whiteness as the institutionalised norm. The following narrative illustrates how teachers drawn from the majority ethnic group can lack the capacity to demonstrate cultural sensitivity and thus contribute to racial and ethnic invalidation for their minority students.
Among. . . the homogeneous teaching profession here, you pretty much know what [the cultural majority] kids do. But there’s a child who’s Muslim. . . and I’m hearing a teacher alarmed at the fact that this child is getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning. Immediately. . . I know why that child’s getting up, but this teacher doesn’t . . . it’s not a matter of rudeness or impoliteness, it’s just a lack of knowledge and exposure. . . If you have children who are fasting, and you go. ‘You can’t eat anything? Nothing at all, no water?’ It’s unnecessary, it’s disrespectful and it’s not culturally responsive.
Lola, as an ‘outsider’ within her ‘school as institution’ understood students’ out of school lives; an understanding that was not shared by her colleagues. This observation is supported by previous research that indicates that minority teacher experiences of marginalisation in their personal lives can contribute to greater conviction to support their students, thus laying the foundation for positive outcomes (Atkins et al., 2014).
I find it so hard when you see children that are getting in trouble [for their uniform]. . . I understand that schools want to obviously model good uniforms and tidy and everything, but is it really a six-year-old’s responsibility?
Schools act as institutions charged with the socialisation of individuals for societal stability and reproduction, communicating and maintaining accepted values for broader society (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Central to the performance of this role is the establishment of expectations for acceptable parameters for behaviour and presentation. Grace found that her experience as a Traveller, and her memories of being the ‘raggedy Traveller child’ allowed her to empathise with students in her school who came from the Travelling community and to recognise how rules regarding uniforms in school presented challenges for those who experienced disadvantage. Her experiences of being outside the structural norms in her own schooling contributed to a greater awareness of problematic practices. This was an awareness her colleagues, whose experiences were culturally and ethnically normative – White, Irish born, Settled, Catholic and overwhelmingly middle class (Devine, 2005; Heinz and Keane, 2018) – did not share. This data illustrates the structural form in which racism can operate, transgressing narratives of individualistic behaviours, within the context of professional practice that works to exclude those who diverge from the norm.
The power of their presence – subverting the majority space
Participants demonstrated a conscious effort to offer representation as teachers in the majority space, challenging the homogenous nature of the institutional space by their presence.
What I see my position as is more of a role model to especially the Black community, the Africans in that community to see that, ‘OK, we have someone of my skin colour around’.
While the effect of role models is contested in the literature (Hopson, 2014; Rezai-Rashti and Martino, 2010; Santoro, 2015), Obi’s position, drawing from CRT, can be considered as a form of agitation or resistance that moves beyond the critique of disparities (Dixson and Rousseau Anderson, 2018). The effect of his presence may be understood by the suggestion that that minority teachers change their students’ expectations for the future and what roles may be open to them, disrupting assumptions as to the natural owners of institutional power (Atkins et al., 2014; Villegas and Irvine, 2010).
With the turn to the far right and this anti-migrant sentiment and racism that we’re seeing with young children being brought to protests around the country. If they then go into school and I’m their teacher and I’m seen as someone who’s trustworthy, lovely, works hard, treats them with dignity and respect and the parents are seeing me in there too, and I look like the people that they’re trying to get out of this hotel. . . that’s sending a narrative that this isn’t OK.
The rise in racial abuse and anti-immigrant sentiment in Irish society was referred to by participants, showing how broader far-right discourses impact public education and enacted curricular experiences (Delahunty et al., 2025). Lola saw the value of her representation in challenging some of the discourses in the world outside her school. Beyond representation related to the mere presence of those from minorities (Pitts, 2007), participants demonstrated agency in addressing and challenging racist beliefs and assumptions in their teaching.
I just think teachers are afraid. They’re scared of doing the wrong thing, so they mightn’t do anything. They have this ideology of ‘Well, no sure, everyone’s treated the same in my classroom. . . But actually, five of the Black or brown children. . . or any ethnic minorities are marginalised. So, they need you more to scream from the rooftop. . . I do what I can with my kids, and I always talk about race and racism with my kids.
Fiona’s recognition of her students’ marginalisation within Irish society, and her position as a racial minority allowed her to challenge individual liberalist and colourblind interpretations of racial inequality from her colleagues and instead highlight structural and institutional causes (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017). It allowed her to critique a philosophy of race neutrality that neglected to critically reflect on how the school can promote social justice (Amos, 2010; Kohli, 2018). Participants also exhibited strong convictions to anti-discriminatory practice. Their commitment extended beyond ethnicity and encompassed broader issues of oppression and including intersections of gender.
Because you have been through as you’re going through it. . . you’ve just this anger and this protectiveness, to not want to see someone be discriminated against. . . be it how they speak or their name, or their sexual orientation. . . Especially because often what happens is, when there’s something in the media about Travellers, I would have found when you’re in school, then it’s all that’s being talked about. . . Right now, it’s all about the trans community and a lot of hatred towards them.
Grace’s own experiences of discourses hostile to her ethnicity contributed to an instinct to support other marginalised groups in the school environment, highlighting the complex intersectional attributes of inequities. While not all participants displayed the same capacity to engage in this work, their accounts demonstrated their sensitivity to broader questions of social justice.
A bridge to the school community; minority teachers as cultural translators
I have found that the children really relate to me. They look at me and they’re like ‘you’re the same as me.’ I’ve been very welcomed by parents, especially parents of migrant children. . . they’re like, ‘Oh, wow, like, you’re a Nigerian too, that’s amazing.
The shared experiences and perspectives between student and their teachers facilitated connexion-making and minority students contributing to student feelings of ‘connectedness’ and improved student experiences (Atkins et al., 2014; Pitts et al., 2007). Participants’ accounts suggested that ethnic congruence with parents also facilitated relationship building with the broader school community.
Different colleagues have come before and said, ‘I’m trying to write something about multicultural[ism] and does this sound right to you?’ and like that was nice. You know, it was like a sounding board.
Other participants reported that their cultural understanding was seen to be an asset as colleagues who availed of their perspectives to ensure that they were operating in a culturally sensitive way. It was significant that some teachers from the majority ethnic group did recognise the value of participants’ perspectives, illustrative of how members of the dominant ethnic group can be open to adopting more inclusive practices.
Inconvenient truth tellers – The challenges of advocacy
The insights of minority teachers helping the school engage with their minority students and parents was valued by their colleagues and school leadership. However, when their advocacy led them to question established school practices they reported encountering resistance. Questioning established, taken for granted practices put minority teachers in positions that were antagonistic to school leadership and their majority colleagues.
[T]here were times when I had to go and stand at the door and pull kids out of the queue and go ‘Sorry, he’s Muslim. He’s not going to mass’. . .obviously I’m not going to be treated particularly well if I undertake that role. Lola
Lola’s account above illustrates the intersection of race, ethnicity and faith within Irish primary education within the phenomena of interest-divergence, where her actions potentially contribute to her alienation from dominant school culture. The acceptance of the religious status quo as the norm contributed to erasure of, or invalidation of, minority students’ identities within the majority space.
Every day that I ever worked in a school in Ireland, in any capacity, I’ve had to wear a mask. . . when you let the mask slip at work and you’re your real self and you get a smack on the head for it. You spend the rest of the day berating yourself and ruminating about how you let the mask slip, and you know, the things that you shouldn’t have said. . . All the time, because when you’re not your authentic self. You’re just not, you’re faking it all the time.
Lola’s perspectives point to a balancing act that she and other ME teachers need to perform, described by as ‘a dialectic position: on the one hand “fitting” in the school system, and on the other continuing to push against it’. (Marom, 2019: 332). While participants recognised problems in how their schools operated, they nonetheless felt the pressure to adapt to the cultural mores of their workplaces.
[T]here are parts of myself that are not necessary. . . they’re not welcome and they’re not appreciated. . . So, they’re little bits that I’ve had to cut off. . . I’ve had to modify myself to a degree, but I think that migrant children have to do that as well. I mean you’re essentially lying all the time, every day. You’re effectively somebody else when you’re in school so you’re not your authentic self. . . I found myself doing ridiculous things that even at a cursory glance, anyone would have thought ‘is this guy for real?’ I guess it’s probably just like hiding any part of one’s identity. You just either get good at it or you give up because there’s no way out. But eventually it gets too much, I mean, I couldn’t sustain that forever. So, I left as soon as the opportunity arose.
While Brenda adopted a pragmatic attitude to her modification of self to comply with her institutional culture, Damian spoke of how he found working in a Catholic school a difficult experience. Participants’ accounts illustrate the strain that those who are divergent from the majority group within the institution perceive themselves as ‘a fish out of water’ (Passeron, cited in Thomas 2002), contributing to perceptions of constant insecurity whereby the outsider expends great effort attempting to assimilate in a context they do not typically belong. The task of advocating for change in a situation is made significantly more challenging in such an environment.
The burden of advocacy in the face of discrimination
As well as feeling the need to adapt their identity to be more congruent to the established culture of their place of work, some participants also reported incidents of overt racism amongst students and staff members.
On Africa Day I’d wear something different, and he might say, ‘oh, look at the bow’ and it’d be like actually a traditional piece in my hair and kind of laugh. I’ve had some adult teachers making fun of my accent, which I find completely out of order. It upsets my whole day.
Fiona’s account speaks to the level of microaggressions characterised as ‘subtle verbal and non-verbal insults/assaults directed towards People of Colour, often carried out automatically or unconsciously’ (Kohli and Solorzano, 2012: 442). Brenda, as a White ethnic minority woman was nonetheless subject to ridicule of her accent, violently reinforcing her outsider status. While some of these comments emerged in attempts at humour, they contributed to a working environment in which minority teachers were subject to reminders of their divergence from the norm and how their ethnicity was not equally valued.
Participants also recounted experiencing such overt and direct incidents of openly racist behaviours and language in their professional practice.
I can tell you now that every school I’ve been in, there’s been something said about Travellers. I wish there wasn’t, I wish I could go to a school and not feel anxious going into a staff room waiting for it to come up.
Grace’s experience illustrates the ubiquitous nature of anti-Traveller sentiment within Irish schools. Considering the circumstances in which Grace operated, where some colleagues expressed negative attitudes and racial stereotyping when referring to Travellers, it is unsurprising that she chose not to publicly disclose her ethnicity, choosing to tell a limited number of colleagues.
I actually was hiding my background. . . I don’t want to bring it up. Because you don’t, it’s a strange thing where you don’t want other people to feel uncomfortable. . .You have 25 minutes [in the staffroom at lunch]. . . I am so hungry at that point; I don’t even want to go into a space where I’m using my break challenging people. . . Why do you have to feel like you have to take on the extra burden of educating people?
The staffroom culture in which she worked contributed to a situation where she felt obliged to listen to such racist comments without complaint. The ever-present nature of racism within society and its presence interwoven through the fabric of public schooling presented a constant source of racial discrimination for Grace. Her account captures how negative attitudes to minority students affect minority teachers themselves, who can also face the burden of challenging everyday racism expressed by their majority ethnic colleagues. Grace’s perception that it was her responsibility to address racist comments when expressed also indicated a lack of an institutional response to such questions, a conclusion that speaks to how racism and prejudice can be normalised in majority dominated spaces.
Similar experiences of problematic ‘teacher talk’ was recounted by Keane et al. (2022b) regarding teacher attitudes to working class students, while Marom (2019) observed that teacher’s negative attitudes to students affected minority teachers deeply. Grace’s account also points to the experience of fatigue where a desire to advocate for the victims of overt racism is overcome by resignation, demoralisation and silence (Amos, 2010; Pizarro and Kohli, 2020). Her ability to promote more culturally sensitive practices was undermined by a climate that was hostile to her ethnicity and concluded that silence was the least intolerable reaction. Participants highlighted the effect that school leadership can have in stifling the advocacy of teachers from minority backgrounds due to an unwillingness to recognise or address questions or racism in education.
I was in the classroom one day and there were comments being made by the children about Traveller children. . . it was disgusting stuff. . . it’s like oh, ‘she’s going out with a p****, dirty k******. . . So I was like ‘I’m going up to the Assistant Principal’. . . I said, ’Look, I don’t mind chatting to them, you can tell them my background. . . we have to make sure that these comments are not being made. . .we have to be serious on it.’ She came back to me and said, ‘look I had the chat with the girls and they’re sorry.’ But it happened again and again. . . was this a whole school approach?
The experience of arguing for more proactive anti-racist leadership and frustration at inadequate responses from school leadership was shared by a number of participants. Participants who identified issues of concern reported not being empowered to effect positive change by school leadership.
I put my hand up in my group and I said, ‘I just think [with] diversity and inclusion. I just think we’re not doing enough at all . . .I felt listened to. But then when it came down to the nitty gritty . . . I felt like it was a tick box. This is what we’ve done. Tick box, we’ve got diversity and inclusion, high up in our school plans.
While Fiona’s initial suggestion regarding the promotion of more racially sensitive practices was greeted positively by her staff and in-school management team, she felt that the superficial nature of their response, evinced in a style of bureaucratic ‘doing’ of diversity, did not address her concerns. School leaders’ reluctance to confront racism within the workplace and to promote racially inclusive practices led to further frustration and demoralisation for participants, an observation shared by Kohli (2018) and Tereshchenko et al. (2020). Grace’s comments below also illustrate how anti racist instincts of minority teachers can be stifled by institutional cultures of schools largely populated by those from the majority ethnic group (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Kohli, 2018; Thomas, 2002), reflecting the systemic norm of whiteness.
When I went to an event in Marino. . . the principals that are showing up on those days are the ones that are interested in Travellers. . . who have a passion for it. . .I bet if I was at those schools, they would be like, ‘will you go in there and do that’ and use me, I want to be used, I want to go in and have the talks with those kids. . . Do I feel like in school I’m in right now, that I’m able to do that? No.
Notwithstanding Grace’s frustrations, she observed that some school leaders were open to adopting approaches that challenged racial inequality. The existence of racially literate leadership with the willingness to foster critical examination of racial inequality offers some hope that the perspectives and cultural capital of teachers from ME backgrounds will be empowered to a greater extent in the future (Burciaga and Kohli, 2018).
I had racial bullying and harassment. . . [I]t was just everyday getting called into the office every day, being shouted at, every day being belittled. . . It caused me at least a decade worth of racial trauma because I had nowhere to go, and I had to work with him until he left. . . The bottom line is he knew that he was safe to do and say these things. Within the institution he had total control. . . he knew the union wasn’t going to do anything, he knew the Department of Education only pays us, that they don’t manage the school. The structure of the Board of Management running the school? He had control of. . . within the institution he had total control.
Lola’s account, by far the most extreme recounted by participants in this study, illustrates the sometimes intolerable situation that teachers from minoritised backgrounds can face (Pizarro and Kohli, 2020). Her narrative illustrates the extent to which racial hostility could be bolstered by institutional power. As the racial abuse she was subjected to came from her school principal experience of racial bullying left her trapped with little recourse. It speaks to the relative powerlessness that ME teachers can experience, in comparison to more senior colleagues from the majority ethnic group (Schmidt, 2015).
Concluding discussion
This study set out the build upon the positive work of increasing diversity within teacher education in Ireland in recent years and extending to an exploration of the material conditions of life as a diverse teacher in the current primary teaching profession. Informed by CRT, as well as core critiques of neoliberal multiculturalism, we interviewed seven teachers from minority backgrounds, currently employed as primary teachers in Ireland. Participants demonstrated their motivation and capacity to support their ethnically diverse students and displayed strong commitments to socially just practices. Their cultural insights into the lives of their minority students was viewed as an asset to their school, offering a bridge between their schools and their increasingly diverse school communities. They also demonstrated their motivation to advocate for change in school practice. However, their advocacy was often unwelcome where colleagues and school leadership did not view current practices as problematic. This case exemplifies the insufficiency with which liberal anti-racist policy milieus in education conceptualise race and racism, specifically, as in our case, within a majority white profession. Participants’ experience of being ‘othered’ within a largely homogeneous teaching staff with established behavioural, and cultural codes required them to manage (or indeed hide) their racial and ethnic identity in their workplaces. Managing one’s identity, or ‘code switching’ can demand emotional and psychological resources that places further strain on non-majority teachers. Some participants experienced racial microaggressions and more overt expression of racial insults and invalidation from colleagues who enjoyed the protection and privilege from their more senior status.
Participants’ accounts demonstrate the importance of addressing questions of racial equity within the teaching profession, and how removing barriers to entry into the primary teaching profession will not fully address the needs of minority teachers. Even without such overt racial abuse, the incidence of more subtle, everyday forms of racism combined with a school leadership that is unable or unwilling to promote anti-racist policies and practices supports the continued systemic privileging of white institutional values and structures. While it is certainly important and necessary to challenge microaggressions, it is critical in the context of this study to think beyond these behaviours, which apart from facilitating the neoliberal individualisation of racism to ‘bad behaviour’, can work at the expense of centring whiteness as a pervasive systemic structure and way of engaging the world (Dabiri, 2021). These findings, therefore, problematise current diversity agendas for the teaching profession in Ireland, augmenting the beneficial work and research on entry pathways to ITE. While these access routes are essential, they cannot alone address a transformative diversification of the teaching profession, where, as our research here shows, there remains institutionally resilient structures of whiteness, that must be challenged. Although the National Access Plan (HEA, 2022) includes the focus of broadening diversity through access to the profession, this must be considered within the broader landscape of educational change in Ireland, amidst the effects of the intense neoliberalisation of education (Delahunty, 2025), the problematic recent past of Ireland’s policy relating to multiculturalism and intercultural education (Bryan, 2010; Kitching, 2010, 2015a), and the current sociopolitical context rife with anti-immigrant sentiment and pursuit of conservative ethnonationalist goals.
Our research demonstrates the institutional reticence to implement radical anti-racist change, despite ostensibly welcoming the discourse of diversity, as well as the embedded forms of racist discourse among both fellow staff and students. This is a key finding that highlights the often overlooked ‘sites’ of education, where the state operates and where subjectivities, within the neoliberal era, are not freed but governed and moulded within the structures of whiteness (Sriprakash et al., 2022). Moreover, it highlights the chasm between acknowledging and ostensibly welcoming diversity from a policy or systemic perspective, and the material conditions actualised through ‘doing diversity’. As Ahmed (2007: p. 244) argues within the context of neo liberalised diversity agendas in universities, diversity ‘becomes another way of “doing advantage”’. Applied to the findings and context of the present work, we can observe how a policy focus on access to ITE without a commitment to a more radical transformation of the education system along truly inclusive and anti-racist trajectories privileges the maintenance of systemic whiteness in the primary teaching profession.
The findings and subsequent discussion have highlighted a pressing need for policy to reflect upon current framings for teacher diversification and an imperative to move beyond issues of access and towards more radically transformative actions for challenging the norms of systemic and institutional whiteness in the teaching profession. This is also critical for the important and necessary work being undertaken across Ireland on forging pathways into the teaching profession via ITE. Within the present reality of education and schooling in Ireland, potential issues of minority teacher attrition, given the experiences recounted in this study, may undermine attempts by policymakers to diversify the teaching profession, denying primary education of diverse voices to better reflect the needs and experiences of students.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank those teachers who agreed to participate in this study. We appreciate your trust in sharing your stories with us and hope that this research can contribute to a more enlightened and inclusive primary education system in the future. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive engagement and aid in refining the work.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical considerations
Ethical approval for this research was granted by the Maynooth University Social Research Ethics Committee. Participants gave written consent prior to commencement of interviews.
