OPINION:The role schools play in binding communities will be badly affected by the Budget's cuts, writes John White
SCHOOLS ARE at the heart of communities. This is why the education cuts announced in the Budget are so devastating: damage a school and you damage the community it serves.
Irish schools are much more than physical spaces for the provision of educational services to young people. By supporting a myriad social, cultural and community activities and by providing significant opportunities for community interaction, Irish schools serve as institutions for social cohesion.
From the schools' mini-company project to school visits to local Chambers of Commerce, to work experience in the community, schools play a key role in creating new networks and strengthening existing ones in the local community.
In the era of commuter workers and new suburban communities, schools continue to help create a sense of belonging among individuals.
Schools run football, hurling, camogie, basketball and many more teams; they raise money for charities; they put on musicals and plays; they engage in community service. Schools have identities: when you think of hurling, you think of St Kieran's in Kilkenny or St Flannan's in Ennis; when you think of Gaelic football, you think of St Jarlath's in Tuam or St Brendan's, Killarney.
It is this sense of identity which gives schools their strengths and it is the reason why parents, teachers and management are incandescent with anger over the Budget cutbacks: cutbacks such as increased class size; the removal of the free book scheme; slashing the teacher substitution scheme; curtailment of physics and chemistry grants.
These cutbacks affect every school. Individual schools have contacted the ASTI to say they will lose anything from two to five teachers, thus preventing highly qualified young teachers from practising their profession.
Losing two teachers might seem not so significant to someone in the Department of Finance, but it means that a principal has to factor in the loss of 66 class periods to the timetable for next year; the loss of four teachers means the loss of 118 classes. Just consider what this means in terms of the curriculum offered: it will inevitably lead to a diminished education; subjects being dropped; higher and ordinary level classes being combined; and larger classes.
One of the major strengths of Irish schools - possibly a legacy of religious involvement - is the concern to educate the whole person. I was once told by a senior civil servant from France that they "don't have schools in France in the same sense as you do in Ireland". Apart from the grind schools, all Irish second-level schools share this goal of educating the whole person.
Hence the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statement that Irish parents can rely on high and consistent standards across all school sectors. The importance of out-of-school activities - such as choirs, orchestras, debates, theatre visits - is obvious in this regard.
That is why the decision not to provide substitute cover for certain absences of teachers and for teachers absent on school business has so concerned the managerial authorities. At the meeting of the Post-Primary Education Forum on Friday, they stated that some schools will have to close in January (when the measures come into effect) because of this decision. This is entirely unnecessary and I call on the Minister for Education to enter discussions as a matter of extreme urgency.
Everybody recognises that there is a crisis in the Government's finances which has to be dealt with. However, doing the bidding of discredited neo-liberal economists and slashing public services is not the way forward, particularly in Ireland when the OECD recently stated that, by international standards, Ireland's expenditure on public services is low. The education service is certainly not "bloated" and solving the fiscal problem by cutting the lifeblood of schools is no solution.
• John White is general secretary of the ASTI, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland