The Department of Education is "moving towards" paying State salaries to Catholic and Protestant chaplains in voluntary secondary schools, a school managers' conference has heard.
Father Luke Monaghan, of the Marino Institute of Education, told the Association of Managements of Catholic Secondary Schools conference in Killarney yesterday it was "a matter of when, rather than if" such State-paid chaplains are appointed. He said the chairman of the Hierarchy's education commission, Bishop Thomas Flynn, had recently had talks with the Department on the issue and had been "very happy" with the outcome.
Last year, the Supreme Court upheld a High Court judgment in a case taken by the Campaign to Separate Church and State that it was not against the Constitution for the State to pay chaplains in community and comprehensive schools.
In his judgment, Mr Justice Costello had said there was no constitutional bar to the State funding the religious formation of children in accordance with their parents' wishes. This is being interpreted as allowing the State to pay chaplains in Catholic and other denominational voluntary secondary schools.
The Department of Education has proposed the setting-up of a working group representing the Hierarchy and other Catholic education bodies to negotiate with it on the payment of chaplains in voluntary Catholic secondary schools.
In her presidential address, Sister Marie Celine Clegg asked what would happen to core Catholic values at a time of curriculum overload. "How can we ensure that our schools remain centres of holistic education when the overwhelming majority of the time which students spend in school is pre-empted by a curriculum that is over-crowded, over-long and over-prescriptive?"
She said it was time for the Department, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and the education partners to stop and consider the fundamental question: "In the real world, who determines ethos?"
Another constraint in realising the objectives of the Junior Cycle curriculum was that new assessment methods were "still no more than pious, or not so pious, aspirations." She said a pilot project to evaluate these methods, and perhaps allay some of the fears about them, was "long overdue and should now be proceeded with".
The Catholic school managers and Joint Managerial Board favoured "school-based assessment with external moderation at Junior Cycle by appropriately trained teachers. To continue to teach the Junior Cycle curriculum without the integral component, which is school-based assessment, was akin to playing football without deciding how to keep the score".
The secondary teachers' union, ASTI, has come out against school-based assessment in the Junior Cycle.
Sister Clegg expressed disappointment with the £7 increase in the annual second-level capitation grant in this year's Budget.