An insider’s guide to education

The Protestant fee-paying schoolshave been widely praised for their skilful public relations campaign on those education cutbacks.

The schools – which engaged the PR firm Drury – kept the issue in the public spotlight by the clever use of keynote speeches and special conferences. It helped that two of their main spokespeople – Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill and parents’ representative, Eleanor Petrie – were so forceful and articulate.

Are there lessons here for the Catholic fee-paying schools? This group took their medicine in the Budget without any great fuss.

The Catholic fee-paying sector is facing unprecedented pressure with questions being asked about taxpayer supports, costing more than €100 million.

Awkward questions are also being raised about enrolment policies in some Catholic fee-paying schools. The Department of Finance – on the basis of its submission to the McCarthy Report – is targeting the fee-paying sector, arguing for a 50 per cent cut in State supports. Some in the Department of Education take a similar view.

Our advice to the Catholic fee-paying sector? The battle has just begin; it might be time to emulate the Protestant schools and begin the fight back.

They are unlikely chart toppers, but the school community at Gaelscoil Bharra has crashed into the top 10 with their single Ca bhfuil ar Scoil?

Gaelscoil Bharra in Cabra, Dublin is now entering its 14th year in totally unsatisfactory prefabs. As local TD Joe Costello has noted, there has been much “toing and froing” involving the Department, the local authority and the GAA (on whose premises the Gaelscoil is situated) and the board of management, but the logjam remains.

You have to admire the school for their innovative way of highlighting this scandal.

And the record ? It’s actually not bad and quite hummable. Whitney Houston please copy.

Is there a greater wasteof the valuable time of public servants in the Department of Education than those ludicrous Dáil questions to the Minister?

Last month, as usual, there were hundreds of questions about routine entitlements to student grants, progress on school building works and access to school supports.

There is a clearly a place for questions on the order of business where the Minister can be questioned closely by the Opposition. But this routine constituency stuff should not be taking up the valuable time of Department officials. A wholly transparent school building programme – along the lines proposed by Noel Dempsey five years ago – would help.

But why do we sense a continued reluctance to publish every detail of the schoolbuilding process on the web?

Are any parents botheringto read the various school inspection reports published by the Department of Education?

According to the Department, more than 6,200 unique site visitors accessed the information between May and June of this year – the most up-to-date information available.

We reckon they must all be teachers or school principals as we have yet to meet any parents who has accessed the (well hidden) site from the Department’s homepage, education.ie

• Email us, in confidence, at teacherspet@irishtimes.com