MINISTER FOR Education Ruairí Quinn has been accused of failing to “protect the most vulnerable in primary education from Mr Chopra and his troika friends’’ by a school leader.
Seán Cottrell, general secretary of the Irish Primary Principals Network, made the charge during an address to over 1,000 principals at the association’s annual conference.
In his address, Mr Quinn defended a range of budget cutbacks in education, including cuts to teacher numbers in smaller schools. “It is not sustainable for my department to continue to provide a second classroom teacher to a school that has 12 pupils.’’
Responding to the general criticism of his policies, he said: “When I hear appeals at this conference or elsewhere for changes to budget measures or the need to spend more in primary education, it worries me that the gravity of the fiscal crisis we are in is still not fully understood.’’
Mr Cottrell contrasted poor support for the primary sector with the more generous funding given to higher education.
“University presidents are a powerful lobby in seeking to increase their funding. Funnily enough, I can’t ever recall being invited to a university cake sale. ’’
On the cutbacks to disadvantaged or Deis schools, Mr Cottrell said inclusion of children with special needs had “worked extraordinarily well since the late 1990s because a scaffolding of resources was put in place to support all pupils in the classroom. Unfortunately, it is now like watching a game of Jenga, where the blocks are being removed one by one.’’
On small schools, he said the absence of any vision other than amalgamations and closures demonstrates a lack of understanding of the importance of small schools and their role in rural Ireland.
Mr Quinn said: “Your conference gives me an opportunity to state categorically that this measure is not about closing schools . . . The change that is being made for small schools is that their average class sizes will no longer be as advantageous as they have been in the past due to the phased increases in the pupil thresholds in the staffing schedule. Can anyone honestly say that we can afford to have a staffing schedule threshold that provides for a full-time classroom teacher with an average as low as six pupils per classroom – a better ratio than applies in most classes in special schools?”
Mr Quinn also stressed that the Government was committed to protecting the Croke Park agreement. “Unlike the previous government, we don’t want to target the public sector for the type of wage cuts that led to a reduction in pay of 14 per cent for some teachers.
“The alternative then, is what this Government has committed to – achieving the savings in public spending required by reducing the overall number of public servants.” That means “educating our children with fewer teachers’’.
