THE Department of Education will this week provide every primary school in the country with a new annual grant of £2,000, plus an extra £9 per pupil for building maintenance and minor improvements.
The scheme, which has been under discussion for a year, will replace the extremely centralised and cumbersome system under which schools have had to apply to the Department for grants and approvals for the smallest jobs, such as painting a classroom or replacing window panes.
Under the £11 million scheme the management boards of the country's 3,300 primary schools will have discretion to spend the new grants as they see fit. They have been advised to open a separate bank account to administer payments and they may save the annual grant over several years to fund a larger project.
The Department estimates that under the new scheme a typical 150 pupil school will receive an annual grant of £3,350 towards maintenance costs. This is in addition to the annual capitation grant of £45 per pupil already allocated for day to day spending. This has risen from £27 since 1993.
A larger, 400 pupil urban school would receive an annual grant off over £5,600.
The Minister for Education, Ms Breathnach, said she would be making a decision on authorising rebuilding and refurbishment for "priority list" schools, such as those at Kilglass, Co Galway, and Urbleshanny, Co Monaghan, next week. "The very bad ones will be the first to go," she said yesterday.
Her decision to go ahead with the new scheme had been inspired by visits to two schools, one in the midlands and the other in Ballymun in Dublin. In the first case she had been "appalled" at the lack of day to day maintenance by a board which "was looking to me to find putty to fix its windows".
In Ballymun, where a new £1.2 million school was to be built, she was concerned about "whether the parish had the wherewithal to raise and put aside the necessary sums for its maintenance".
The general secretary of the Irish National Teachers Organisation, Mr Joe O'Toole, welcomed the implementation of the scheme, which he said was a response to the INTO's campaign against sub standard primary schools, but called it "a little and a little too late".
He said it would "go nowhere near enough to deal with the more than 40 seriously sub standard schools, like Kilglass".
He said the INTO would continue its series of one day teacher strikes in protest at the Government's failure to honour its commitment to renovate or replace all sub standard school buildings. The next stoppage will be at Urbleshanny NS on February 4th.