OPPOSITION TO a range of education cuts in the Budget gained momentum yesterday as various groups accused Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe of targeting the most vulnerable.
In a significant move, the former chairman of the National Council for Special Education, Tom Murray, said the Budget had launched a cowardly and concerted attack on children with special educational needs.
The hard-fought success to gain rights for children with special needs had been "totally undermined" by the sneaky decision to "defer" implementation of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act which gave children and parents new rights.
The Budget, he said, would mean "business as usual" for special needs children, with no progress on their right to an appropriate education in an inclusive setting.
The Minister yesterday defended the Budget cuts. "The bottom line is that education could not be spared from taking some share of the pain.''
The president of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, Áine O'Neill, said the wave of cuts attacked and undermined our most vulnerable students.
"Some €3 million is saved by ending supporting grants to programmes like Transition Year and the Leaving Cert Applied, availed of by students who would be most likely to drop out of school. Is that what you want? Fewer students continuing at second level? Shame on you, Minister!''
In his address to a conference in Kilkenny, the Minister said he had sought to shelter essential services like education as much as possible.
"I have had to make a number of changes that impact on both the human resources and day-to-day funding available to you in your schools. Let me be clear. None of these measures are desirable, but taken in the round they are essential.
"There is an inescapable fact that pay constitutes the bulk of current expenditure on education, and therefore measures impacting on the teaching resources available to schools were necessary," he continued.
"It would not have been realistic to try to meet the budgetary targets agreed by the Government without having to disproportionately impact on non-pay areas, like day-to-day funding for schools.''
In other Budget reaction, Michael Moriarty of the Irish Vocational Education Association said it was "nonsensical to assume that there were no disadvantaged pupils in those schools not designated as disadvantaged".
"The withdrawal of certain capitation funding from schools not designated as disadvantaged schools actually penalises schools for having disadvantaged pupils.
"It inequitable, unfair and potentially discriminatory.''
TUI president Don Ryan also said almost 1,000 second-level teaching jobs would be lost from the start of the next school year because of Budget changes.