Going public
The decision of Waterford’s Newtown School to enter the free education scheme in September makes it four fee-paying schools that have surrendered “private” status since budget cuts began to bite.
The only Quaker-run secondary school in the State, Newtown said its decision was motivated by financial pressures and a desire to become “more accessible”, in line with its ethos. Numbers had dropped at the co-ed boarding and day school, from 350 five years ago to 283 today.
Principal Keith Lemon said parents find it more difficult to afford fees, while the cuts in pupil-teacher ratios had a “knock-on effect”. While there will be no fees for day pupils, the school will continue to offer paid-for extra-curriculars and boarding, albeit on reduced rates. Seven-day boarding drops from €13,200 to €9,750.
Protestant school managers have argued the budget cuts have disproportionately affected minority faith schools, especially in rural areas, which accommodated students from a broad social spectrum. Last year, the CoI Kilkenny College transferred to the free scheme, while Wilson’s Hospital School in Co Meath is doing likewise this September.
The Catholic Gormanston College in Co Meath is also to join the scheme from September, and according to the Department of Education a further eight of the country's 55 fee-paying schools are in discussions about taking a similar course. The Department stressed this does not necessarily mean they will all scrap fees. However, the net effect of reducing State funding for fee-paying schools may be to make the remaining elite in Irish education even more exclusive.
Losing support
The annual meeting of the Joint Managerial Body (JMB) doesn't
grab the same headlines as the teachers' conferences but this year it included a revealing insight into how schools are managing cuts in resources for special educational needs. In a survey of school managers published at its meeting in Galway, the JMB said the 15 per cent cut in supports since 2010 for pupils with special educational needs (SEN) was affecting the quality of education for all children.
The average loss per school in the survey was just under 17 resource teaching hours per week, it said, and the area most affected by the cuts was one-to-one resource teaching by specialists. It reported a "marked increase in diagnoses of both high and low incidence disabilities", and identified coping strategies, such as allocating resource teaching to a non-specialist, drawing the deputy principal into SEN work, and privately paying for additional resource teaching services. "Schools are forced to lose their focus on vulnerable and needy individual students and to begin operating solely on a collective basis in terms of service provision." The individual child is thus "lost" unless they begin to opt-out or act-out in the face of the insurmountable challenges of school life. The report said: "Students in difficulties have limited life experience, vocabulary, maturity, emotional or cognitive capacity to cope with the social and academic demands of school which challenge even the most able." This was causing "immediate and long-term damage to the life chances of all students, not just those with identified special need," said the JMB.
