Small schools are the beating heart of rural Ireland – yet many are fighting just to keep their doors open. Media reports about “empty schools” miss the point entirely. Context, as always, is key.
Rural schools face a myriad of pressures: falling birth rates, population drift, restrictions on planning permission, weak public infrastructure and years of economic neglect. But the rot truly set in with the austerity cuts of 2012.
That year, small schools were disproportionately hit as government decisions drove up pupil-teacher ratios, which stripped teachers from them and slashed already meagre capitation grants. Designed as cost-saving measures, these cuts hit small rural schools hard, sparking protests and leaving communities fearful for their futures.
There was a glimmer of hope in 2019 when then minister for education Joe McHugh – himself a former pupil of a small Gaeltacht school – convened a landmark symposium on the future of small schools. The event was productive, building momentum for a cross-departmental approach to sustaining them.
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Six years on, not nearly enough has been done. To its credit, government did establish a two-year small schools pilot project in 2021, supporting clusters of schools and enabling them to collaborate and identify common challenges and trial innovative solutions.
The results were striking. Coaching for school staff, administration software packages saving significant administration time and improved home-schools communications. The introduction of cluster administration officers was a game-changer. But here’s the catch – just six clusters were set up, covering fewer than 30 schools. Despite the clear success, government kicked the can down the road, extending the pilot by two additional years.
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The current programme for government promises to expand the best aspects of the scheme to 1,300 schools nationally. The Irish National Teachers’ Organsation (INTO) has called for an initial €6 million for the 2026-2027 school year to provide one cluster administration officer to each of about 250 small-school clusters.
But even with this, the greatest threat remains: the loss of teaching posts.
Ireland provides one teacher for every 23 pupils – well above the European average of one for every 19. But many small schools are even worse off. Teachers in these schools have to juggle multiple age groups and curriculums in vastly overcrowded classrooms.
In many primary schools, pupil numbers per teacher are notably high. A typical three-teacher school has about 74 pupils, while four-teacher schools average 103. Five-teacher schools often have about 132 pupils, and six-teacher schools can reach up to 160. These figures highlight the scale of classroom overcrowding that must be addressed.
The injustice is plain. That six-teacher school has no choice but to place children into classes of 26 or 27. In fact, this summer one seven-teacher school in Co Kildare lost a teacher simply because enrolment slipped from 161 to 160. This severe blow resulted in the 160 children having to be redistributed across six classrooms – packed in like sardines, while down the corridor the classroom with no teacher has been left empty.
This is not bad luck. It is the direct result of government choices. In the past two budgets ministers failed to reduce class sizes. Had they acted, that school would have kept its seventh teacher at 155 pupils and many other rural schools who have been in the firing line over the last two summers would have kept their teachers too.
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The funding picture is equally bleak. That same school with 160 pupils receives a paltry €107 a day – from September to August – to cover energy, insurance, materials, ICT, staff training, cleaning, maintenance, water and other costs that have risen sharply in recent years. Local communities are heavily relied upon to make up for the shortfall in direct funding. So much for free education.
Small schools are not luxuries; they are the anchors of rural communities. The beating heart of towns and villages. Unless government invests properly in class-size reductions, funds schools adequately and provides additional administrative supports, rural Ireland will continue to see its lifeblood drained away.
John Boyle is general secretary of the INTO
