True extent of the damage will emerge

TEACHING MATTERS:It's a little strange for a primary teacher to be penning an end-of-year report given that summer in the primary sector is still a good bit over the horizon. Despite the fact that the focus of the education world shifts to the State examinations, it remains business as usual for half a million primary school pupils and their teachers.

In recent weeks, many end-of-year reports have marked Brian Cowen's annus horribilisas Taoiseach. A similar assessment of his Education Minister at the moment would probably produce somewhat less scathing reports.

Has he outperformed his boss? Not really.

The simple reason is that the full impact of Mr O’Keeffe’s year in office will not be seen until next September.

A useful exercise for the rest of the school year for parents of primary school pupils might be to have a good look a the system as it is today. The simple truth is that the landscape will be very different next year when the impact of last year’s budget cuts will be felt in full.

We have seen a decade of relative progress and many noteworthy achievements in primary education. Given the extent of the global economic downturn, exacerbated at home by Government mismanagement, it was inevitable that progress in education would decelerate. What parents will see next September is the extent to which the primary education system will be thrown into reverse.

Already over-crowded classes will be even more over-crowded. The Government claim of “only one extra pupil per class” will be seen for what it is – lies, damn lies and statistics. Thousands of classes will have three, four and five additional pupils.

On top of this, classroom teachers will be the only support for hundreds of special-needs pupils and thousands of newcomer children with little or no English. The scarcest resource in schools will be teacher time as classroom teachers struggle to meet these diverse needs while teaching a class at the same time.

The net result of this will be more whole-class teaching, less activity-based learning and little if any individual attention.

The impressive curriculum which came on stream as the Celtic Tiger began to roar 10 years ago will be a direct casualty. It is simply not possible to conduct science experiments, one-to-one literacy sessions and small group numeracy sessions in over-crowded classrooms.

After yet another year of no Government investment in school computers more and more classrooms will see their IT plans falling apart. This, I believe, is a greater threat to US foreign direct investment than any tax proposals President Obama may have in store, as I believe any in depth analysis would show.

Primary teachers are by nature optimists and want to see their pupils do well. Students’ end-of-year reports reflect this with most teachers using them to encourage and cajole pupils. A good example is the often-used line: “I am confident the best is yet to come.”

Unfortunately, in this case, the truth is that because of O’Keeffe’s first year in office we know the worst is yet to come.

Aidan Gaughran is a primary school teacher in Clonmel, Co Tipperary