Unlike most of her ministerial colleagues, Mary Coughlan, the Minister for Education, was in upbeat form at the launch of the Government’s four-year plan last week.
Coughlan has done well to limit education cutbacks to €690 million from a budget of close to €36 billion over the next four years. The minister can claim with some justification that she has done well.
But the devil may be in the detail. Some of the most disadvantaged in our education system will take the most pain. Resource and language-support teachers will be cut back.
There will be lower levels of support for the Leaving Certificate vocational programme and in programmes for Travellers.
There is also a 5 per cent drop in funding for adult literacy programmes and for the much-lauded School Completion Programme, which is designed to keep kids in school and out of trouble.
In another controversial measure, students will have to pay €200 to gain a place on a post-Leaving Certificate course. Many of those seeking places are the newly unemployed who need training.
Meanwhile, there is to be no cut in the €100 million in supports for fee-paying schools and no attempt to cull the huge number of education quangos. And, of course, there is little or no pain for the several hundred in the education sector whose annual salaries exceed €100,000.
- You spendhours waiting for a bus and then two come along in quick succession. It was a bit like that in the Department of Education last week when not one but two significant reports were launched.
One by the excellent Education Research Centre at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, tracked student progress in maths and literacy. The other – a report based on unannounced inspections of schools – exposed poor teaching standards in no less than 15 per cent of schools.
In a different week, both reports would have made headlines. As it was, they failed to gain much attention. But these reports are vastly more significant than most of the material coming from the department. They dramatically expose shortcomings in Irish education. More than that, they underline the determination of new department chief inspector, Dr Harold Hislop, to push through a new agenda focusing on quality. The days when the department saw itself as a cheerleader for its teachers and schools is slowly ending. Is a revolution at hand?
- In all,957 families in Gorey, Co Wexford, said they would like Educate Together, the multi-denominational group, to run a new second-level school there. But they were outvoted by the 1,500 or so who supported the Vocational Education Committee (VEC) in a poll of parents. So the department selected the VEC as the patron of the new school in what is billed as a victory for local democracy.
But is it? For years, the Department of Education was lamentably slow to recognise and respond to demands for multi-denominational education. Educate Together is now the fastest-growing school patron in the State, controlling 58 schools and educating 11,500 children at primary level. But it is still shut out of second-level education.
Close to 1,000 people in Gorey and thousands of others around the country want their children to go to a multi-denominational second-level school. Why should they be denied this choice?
