So it's farewell then . . . fair EL

We weren't on the Minister's list, but our staffroom is having the builders in over the summer.

By the time the "restructuring" is finished, the place will hardly be recognisable. You know that teacher who was on Morning Ireland last week saying that the staffroom in his school was way too small - just a storage closet? He was lucky! The budget constraints around here mean that if the management's plans are fulfilled, there will hardly be room for any of us when the job is done - "here" being the offices of EL.

It's not the state of the national finances that has been our problem, just those of The Irish Times. We're told that a 16-page education supplement is more than the bank-balance can bear, so along with the well-publicised cuts that are affecting other areas of the newspaper, it will have to go.

EL will continue, however, in a different form, with two pages each week in the main part of The Irish Times. That will make a change from the familiar for readers, and indeed for the staff of EL and Education Services - a large number of whom have been involved with the supplement since its foundation a decade ago under the editorship of the late Christina Murphy. Several of the staff have already decided to avail of the voluntary-severance terms on offer from the newspaper to leave the company altogether; they include a name that will be familiar to anyone who has attended Higher Options or a Music in the Classroom concert, or tried their wits in the Irish Times Debates - Paula O'Gorman, the Head of Education Services. (The events themselves will largely continue, under new management...)

Other familiar names and faces will move on, too.

The rest of us wait and see. The changes we face - like the work we have done over the years tracking a sector of enormous change in this society - are likely to be an education.