Previous quantitative research on teachers and teacher job satisfaction in the Republic of Ireland suggests teachers are satisfied with their jobs overall (Darmody and Smyth, 2010); however, an overwhelming majority of Ireland’s teachers are White Irish Catholic (Keane and Heinz, 2018) and come from middle class backgrounds (Keane and Heinz, 2015). Qualitative research from the Diversity in Initial Teacher Education (DITE) Project at the University of Galway has demonstrated that working class student teachers in Ireland felt, based on their own schooling experiences, that middle class teachers underestimated the academic abilities and career aspirations of students from lower social class backgrounds (Keane, Heinz and Lynch, 2018, 2020). Studies of job satisfaction among working class teachers in England (Maguire, 2005), and the United States (Benton, 2007; Jones, 2003; Lee, 2017; Mello, 2004) reported their feelings of not fitting in with their fellow teachers, difficulties communicating with pupils’ parents and some difficulty relating to pupils unless teaching in rural or low socioeconomic status schools. Furthermore, subsequent to the Irish Department of Education’s launch of the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS)- designation for publicly funded schools in economically disadvantaged areas, DEIS teachers have reported issues in classroom management, and problematic encounters with working class parents in these schools (Burns and O’Sullivan, 2023).  Earlier international research on teacher job satisfaction and burnout has noted significant correlations between teacher-pupil, teacher-parent, and teacher-colleague interactions and the teacher’s job satisfaction (Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011; Spilt, et al., 2011; Decker, et al., 2007; Green, et al., 2007; Pianta, et al., 2006; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1995).

Pepe et al.’s  nine-item internationally tested  Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale (TJSS) (Pepe, et al., 2017; Chalghaf, et al., 2019) has demonstrated, across five different languages and eight countries, that teacher job satisfaction can be reliably constructed from the following three factors: 1) satisfaction with teacher-colleague relationships, 2) satisfaction with teacher-pupil relationships, and 3) satisfaction with teacher-parent/guardian relationships. The scale is comprised of three items per relationship type. In all studies, Cronbach’s alpha for the nine-item scale was not less than 0.79, with p = 0.01. Furthermore, multiple confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated above-satisfactory fit indices in all studies (Pepe, et al., 2017; Chalghaf, 2019).

Thus, it is posited that teacher job satisfaction is a formative construct (Nayak, 2022), which is greatly impacted by latent factors associated with teachers’ professional relationships and interactions with their colleagues, pupils, and their pupils’ parents/guardians. This view is supported by prior quantitative studies from America (Pianta, et al., 2006; Pianta, 2019), Belgium (März & Kelchtermans, 2019), Norway (Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011), and India (Pamu, 2010), which demonstrated the positive correlations between pupils’ disruptive behaviours in the schools, difficulties with parents and teacher burnout and career dissatisfaction.

To date, no study has tested the TJSS in the Republic of Ireland; nor has any study incorporated teaching in a designated economically disadvantaged school environment as a potential mediator of job satisfaction. Hence, this paper’s main objective is to better understand how and to what extent relationships with pupils and their parents in DEIS schools may play a role in teacher’s ratings of their job satisfaction. Therefore, the main research questions are:

What are the levels of job satisfaction of teachers in Ireland as measured by Pepe et al.’s Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale?

To what extent does teaching in a DEIS-designated school impact scores on the TJSS?

Survey data was collected from a total cohort of 265 teachers, residing in the Republic of Ireland (n = 182) and Northern Ireland (n = 83), via on online Microsoft Forms questionnaire, which was disseminated via emails to primary and secondary schools, Twitter, and Facebook during the spring and early summer of 2022. Teacher respondents represented a diverse range of primary and secondary schools (Education and Training Boards (ETB), community, DEIS, private, grammar, and Irish-medium). Of the 182 in the Republic, a small proportion, 6.3% (n=29) of the teachers, reported current employment in a DEIS-designated school. Teacher’s perceptions of their relationships and interactions with colleagues, pupils, and the pupils’ parents/guardians were assessed using the English language version of the TJSS (Pepe, et al., 2017) with the entire teacher cohort (n = 265). School type was self-reported on the questionnaire using a multiple-choice categorical variable, from which a nominal variable DEIS School (DEIS = 1; non-DEIS = 0) was derived. The internal structure and discriminant validity of the nine-item TJSS (Cronbach’s a = 0.83) was confirmed by above satisfactory fit indices via Confirmatory Factor Analysis in R. Teachers reported their perceptions of their teacher-colleague (Cronbach’s a = 0.86), teacher-pupil (Cronbach’s a = 0.79), and teacher-parent relationships (Cronbach’s a = 0.86) via three items per relationship category. To test the strength and direction of a relationship between teaching in a DEIS school, TJSS scores generally, and total scores for each of the three constructs on the TJSS, point biserial correlations were run in SPSS using the Republic cohort.

A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates that the TJSS falls within the Hu and Bentler’s (1999) recommended range of best model fit statistics: χ2 (24, N = 265) = 36.316, p = .05), CFI = 0.965; Tucker-Lewis Index = 0.947; RMSEA = 0.079; SRMR = 0.073. These results are expected. Mean scores across each of the nine items for this cohort demonstrate that, on average, teachers on the island of Ireland are largely satisfied with their teaching jobs, with most items displaying an average score above 4 per item and none less than 3.5 (for item 4, ‘My students act in a self-disciplined manner’, SD = 0.9) on the instrument’s scale of 1 to 5, where 1 = Strongly Disagree and 5 = Strongly Agree. Regarding the mediation effects of the DEIS School variable, results of the two-tailed point biserial correlation tests between DEIS School and all nine items on the TJSS for the Republic cohort (n = 182) demonstrated significant negative correlations at the 0.01 level, on the six items relative to the two latent constructs, satisfaction with pupils and satisfaction with parents. Furthermore, point biserial correlations between each of the three latent constructs and DEIS School returned significant negative correlations at the 0.01 level between Satisfaction with Pupils and DEIS School (- 0.48, p = 0.00) and Satisfaction with Parents/Guardians and DEIS School (- 0.46, p = 0.00). In contrast, there was no significant mediating effect between the variable DEIS School and the latent construct Satisfaction with Colleagues. Granted the small DEIS School cohort (n = 29), these results are considered tentative, and will be further informed by forthcoming qualitative results from follow-up teacher interviews and open-ended responses from the questionnaire.

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