Report Schools Substitute Teachers SNAs

How Subs and SNAs Actually Get Booked in Ireland

Billie Muchmore Head of Marketing, ClassCover

Published 24 Jul 2026

The short answer: We surveyed over 1,000 substitute teachers and SNAs across Ireland asking one question: how are you currently getting booked for work? In 2026, the answer is strikingly low-tech. Two in three get their work from a school that already knows them and picks up the phone. Half of substitute teachers live in WhatsApp groups. SNAs have limited channels available to them. And a decent share of NQTs and teachers new to subbing are finding it hard to get a look in. Ireland is short of substitute teachers, and the scattered, informal way cover gets found is making that worse. A booking platform like ClassCover is what joins it back up.

What we asked, and who answered

As ClassCover prepares to launch in Ireland, we wanted to know how substitute teachers and SNAs in Ireland currently get their work, so we asked them directly. More than 1,000 responses from every county, ticking all channels that apply, which is why the figures below add up to well over 100%.

These are subs and SNAs actively working right now. Geographically they cluster where the population does: Dublin at 21%, Cork at 11%, Galway at 8%, with Tipperary and Limerick close behind.

The mix at a glance

Source: ClassCover

Both groups run on relationships

Strip it all back and the biggest channel is also the oldest. A school that already knows you picks up the phone and asks if you are free. Nearly two-thirds of substitute teachers (64%) and SNAs (65%) get their work exactly this way. No mechanism to let the school know real time availability, just a number saved in a principal's phone and a bit of trust built up over the years.

Most of the time it holds together well enough. It falls apart on one specific morning: the one where your regular subs are unavailable. That is when the phone tree starts, and a principal's morning vanishes into it. One principal we interviewed had a formal supply panel to fall back on, but it held just seven teachers shared across seventeen schools, so on the mornings he needed someone it was almost always tapped out.

Finding cover here already runs on trust. The people are real and the relationships are real. What's missing is the layer that keeps it working when your first three calls come back with a no.

None of that trust goes to waste on ClassCover, a booking platform for substitute teachers and SNAs launching in Ireland in September 2026. It keeps the subs a school leans on right at the top of the list and makes them easier to reach, while connecting schools to a wider pool of subs and SNAs: availability in one place, a booking confirmed in a tap, no ringing round. When your regulars are all busy, it widens the net to other trusted subs nearby.

WhatsApp is the big divide

The sharpest split between the two groups is WhatsApp. Half of all substitute teachers (49%) find work through it, against just 30% of SNAs. For subs it is the second biggest channel by a mile, and it is easy to see the appeal. A message appears in a stream of messages on WhatsApp, you reply, you are booked, if you happen to get there first. Fast, mobile, no faff.

The trouble is everything WhatsApp cannot do. It keeps no availability list, no record of who said yes first, no confirmation that the booking happened. And it buckles at scale. WhatsApp caps a group at 1,024 members, and in cities like Dublin the main cover groups are already full. That does damage: the ready, willing subs who could be filling classrooms cannot get in, and a school posting to the group will never see them. A full group is not a live one either, padded with members who stopped subbing long ago, so a cover request lands in front of a crowd where many are no longer looking. One principal we interviewed described firing a request into a group of close to 500 and getting 20 replies in a minute from people he could not check: as he put it, "you tend not to know any of them, so you can't verify them."

Add in the personal phone numbers exposed to a thousand-odd strangers and the open invite links that let anyone in, and it becomes a safeguarding problem. Impersonation and scam activity on WhatsApp is a known and rising threat in Ireland, flagged by the National Cyber Security Centre (RTÉ), and an open group holding hundreds of principals' and teachers' contact details is exactly the kind of soft target those warnings describe.

Subs put up with all of it because nothing better exists. We take the full case apart in our piece on why WhatsApp groups can't solve Ireland's substitute teacher crisis.

Channel reliance, side by side

Averages hide the telling part: how differently the two groups are exposed when a channel goes quiet.

Source: ClassCover

Nearly half of substitute teachers work two or more channels, so if one dries up there is another still running. SNAs mostly cannot, because nobody has solved the challenge or provided a tool. Almost three-quarters have a single way in, and if it goes cold, they wait.

The SNA gap is real, and nobody is closing it

Ireland funds close to 24,900 SNA posts, a workforce that has grown every year. For a role that size, the way SNAs actually get booked is astonishingly thin, and they turn out to be the most exposed group by a distance:

• 73% use a single channel only, against 55% of subs.
• 42% depend entirely on direct contact from schools they already know, against 24% of subs.
• Just 10% use a sub-specific job board, against 27% of subs.

Four in ten SNAs have exactly one route to work, and it runs through whoever happens to have their number, and have gone through the long process of individual vetting.

Nobody has built for them. The sub-specific boards were designed around teachers, so SNAs make do with general job sites instead. EducationPosts.ie came up more than any other write-in among SNAs, named in roughly a third of them, and it is a noticeboard rather than a booking tool, so the SNA is left doing all the chasing.

Garda vetting makes it harder again, and this is the part no tool can wave away. Every SNA has to be vetted individually by each school that takes them on, a process one principal we interviewed described as taking a minimum of three weeks, form by form, and one that plainly can't be done at short notice. Nor does clearance travel far: SNAs are vetted school by school, and even for teachers, vetting is tied to a school board that does not automatically carry across the roughly fifteen education and training boards nationwide. A universal system is being talked about, but it is not here yet, and no app can change the requirement itself.

What a tool can do is take the strain out of everything around it. ClassCover does not carry out the vetting: the school stays responsible for that, exactly as now. What it gives a school is a way to stay on top of it. New subs and SNAs sit in a holding list until the school confirms their vetting is complete, then move onto the approved list, ready to book. A school can message them through the platform to request Garda vetting certificates and documents, work a whole pool of new SNAs through vetting at once instead of one at a time, and store every Teaching Council and Garda vetting expiry date with a reminder before it lapses. The vetting still has to happen. What changes is that a school can steadily build a far wider bench of vetted, bookable SNAs, rather than starting cold every time cover falls through.

The supply pool schools never see

There's an added challenge here for anyone new to subbing: a newly qualified teacher, someone back from a few years abroad, or a teacher taking it up as a semi-retirement. They are qualified and ready to work, but they start with none of the relationships it all runs on.

With cover sorted through personal contacts and WhatsApp groups that are often already full, there's no simple way for them to get found. For a lot of them the route in is still to pound the pavement, calling into schools in person to drop off a CV. A capable sub can be a few streets from a school that needs them and still not be on its list.

And it is not only the newcomers. The same disconnect runs through the whole system. There are a record 122,743 teachers on the Teaching Council register, up more than 4,000 in a single year. Yet in October 2025, 60% of primary and special schools still could not find a substitute when they needed one, across a survey of 565 schools run by the INTO with IPPN and CPSMA. The supply is there on paper. Connecting it to the schools that need it is where the system falls down.

Ireland is short of substitute teachers, no question, and the wider shortage is well documented. But part of the answer is already here. New and returning teachers and SNAs come into subbing all the time. The catch is that the usual ways of finding cover only pick them up once they are already known. A way to surface them sooner would put more of them in front of schools when it counts.

The supply pool is bigger than any one phone list. Every school has available subs near it right now that it has no way to see. Close that gap and cover gets easier without adding a single new teacher to the system.

Why the pattern points to a booking platform

Line the six channels up and the weak ones all share a flaw: they leave the sub waiting. You post to a job board, message a group, drop a CV at the office, and then everyone sits back to see what comes back. Nothing is settled.

That is why, for all the newer options, most cover still gets sorted the old way, with a call to a school that already knows you. The phone survives because it reliably ends in a yes, and a yes is the whole point. A jobs board waits; a booking platform confirms.

ClassCover gives that certainty to everyone, not just the subs lucky enough to sit in a principal's phone. A school builds a shortlist of subs it trusts and books them first, with an automatic fallback to a wider local pool when they are busy. Subs and SNAs set their availability once and get booked in a tap, including the ones who were never on anybody's list. Schools get cover in minutes, subs get booked with a tap.

What this means for principals

Your best cover is the sub you already know, and the data is firmly on your side. The relationship was never the problem. What breaks is the morning it comes back empty, with your regular booked and the trusted names all out.

That is the moment ClassCover is built for. It keeps your own subs first in line and stretches your reach past them, into the vetted, available people near your school you currently have no way of finding. The 39-call morning is what happens when the tool is missing.

What this means for substitute teachers and SNAs

Getting found is the hard part, especially when you are new. ClassCover changes how that works. You set up a profile and your availability once, schools in your area can find you, and you can ask to join their lists. Instead of dropping CVs into front offices, you become discoverable to the schools around you, and the more lists you are on, the more cover requests reach you.

You still have to be on a school's list to be booked, but once you are, requests come straight to you when it needs someone, with no re-registering every week to stay visible. For SNAs especially, being on a school's local network is the difference between waiting for a call and being one of the first names it sees.

The model is already proven

None of this is theoretical. ClassCover runs exactly this model in Australia, where 1 in 2 schools use it to book substitute teachers and SNAs, and most cover is confirmed in under three minutes. The average booking lands in 2 minutes and 17 seconds.

The subs and SNAs were always there. What changed was the layer connecting them to the schools that needed them. Ireland just has not had that layer until now.

Coming to Ireland

Cover today runs on trust and lives in scattered, informal channels, and it leaves a lot of willing, capable people on the outside looking in. That is a fixable problem, and it is the one ClassCover is built to fix.

ClassCover Ireland is taking waitlist sign-ups now at classcoverapp.ie, and it will be the first platform to book SNAs alongside teachers. Schools can apply for the pilot. Substitute teachers and SNAs can register their interest, and for them it is free, always.

Don't post and wait. Book and be done.

Further reading

For broader Irish education and regulatory context: Department of Education and Youth (gov.ie), Teaching Council of Ireland, Irish National Teachers' Organisation, Teachers' Union of Ireland, National Vetting Bureau (Garda vetting).