EDUCATE TOGETHER has been named as patron of seven new primary schools by Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn.
The decision confirms the multidenominational group’s status as the fastest growing patron in Irish education.
In a further reflection of changing trends, there was no school under the patronage of the Catholic Church among the primary schools announced yesterday.
The Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference said the church did not apply for patronage of the new schools as there was already adequate Catholic provision in the relevant areas. The bishops added that they welcomed “additional forms of patronage where there was parental demand for such”.
Educate Together will run new schools in Stepaside, Ballinteer, and Tallaght West in Dublin, and in Kildare town and Ashbourne, Co Meath; all of them will open later this year.
It will also be patron of schools in Firhouse/Oldbawn and Carpenterstown in Dublin and at Douglas/Rochestown in Cork which will open next year.
In all, Educate Together will be patron of five of the seven new primary schools opening this year.
Since its first school opened in 1978, Educate Together has grown to become the main provider of multidenominational primary education. The group opened 19 schools in the last five years; 12 in 2008 alone. There is are 60 Educate Together primary schools in the Republic; this compares with over 3,000 under the control of the Catholic Church.
Educate Together also plans to provide schools at second level, and earlier this year Mr Quinn officially recognised the group as a second-level patron.
Mr Quinn said: “The decisions taken by me on patronage of the new schools place a particular emphasis on providing for demonstrated parental demand for plurality and diversity of patronage. These new schools will optimise parental choice and strengthen diversity of provision.”
It was also announced yesterday that An Foras Pátrúnachta will run schools in west Dublin at Mulhuddart, Firhouse/Oldbawn and Stepaside.
Mr Quinn has also agreed to establish community national schools, run by the local VECs, in Fortunestown, Tallaght West and Lucan in Dublin and in Mallow, Co Cork. The Minister will publish a report on the operation of community national schools in the coming weeks.
Separately yesterday, Mr Quinn said Ireland had been shaken out of its “complacency” and the view that it had “the best education system in the world” by an OECD study that showed educational outcomes had declined in a decade.
He was speaking in Dublin to mark the publication, by children’s charity Barnardos, of the book Early Literacy and Numeracy Matters by Dr Geraldine French.
The OECD Pisa education rankings in literacy and maths published in December 2010 showed Ireland had slipped from fifth to 17th place in reading levels since 2000.
Mr Quinn – then in opposition – said that what had “shattered and angered” him most was that, after 30 years and with increasing resources put into education, reading outcomes, particularly for a cohort of working-class boys, had deteriorated.