LOCAL PLEBISCITES are expected to be held in each school area where the Catholic Church agrees to relinquish control, Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe said yesterday.
He was speaking as Department of Education officials continue work on identifying areas where the Catholic Church is over-represented and where it is prepared to hand over control of school management to other patrons.
The department is using new technology to identify areas where there will be rapid population growth and those where a better mix of patrons is required. The Catholic Church controls more than 90 per cent of primary schools in the State.
Mr O’Keeffe said the department and the church were working together in the process. But he said nothing would be done without full consultation with school communities, which would probably involve a plebiscite to test local views. Discussions would also have to take place with alternative patrons.
The multidenominational group Educate Together – which the Minister praised for its management of primary schools in the Dáil this week – would seem well-placed to take over management of the schools.
However, local vocational education committees could also have a key role. Two new State-run community primary schools have been established on a pilot basis under the aegis of the Co Dublin VEC.
The Minister was speaking at the annual conference of the Irish Primary Principals Network (IPPN), where he was accused of a “ruthless cull” of special needs assistants by IPPN director Seán Cottrell. Network president Pat Gough said: “If you pull the rug from children with special needs too early, the support system can collapse altogether.” Up to 1,000 special needs assistant posts are expected to be abolished over the coming months. A number of contracts for special needs assistants were due to end yesterday.
The Minister would not be drawn on how many such posts would be abolished as part of a current review of the process, but said media speculation it was about 1,000 posts was not accurate.
In his address, Mr Cottrell said the quality of leadership evident in an under-funded primary school system has been truly remarkable.
“If it were primary principals who were leading our banks, churches and State agencies, somehow I doubt we would be in the mess that we are in now. What if it were the other way around? Think of a primary school with Bertie Ahern as principal, Desmond Connell as the school patron, Rody Molloy chairing the board and Seán Fitzpatrick as treasurer.”
The Minister confirmed that 100 extra teaching posts would be provided to schools this school year. Details of the schools that will be allocated the new teachers were published on the department’s website yesterday.
Mr O’Keeffe said the posts, announced in the renewed Programme for Government, would be allocated to primary schools that had increased numbers this year. Extra teachers would also go to the schools that lost out on a teaching post because of last year’s pupil-teacher ratio change.
Separately yesterday, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin supported Cardinal Seán Brady’s defence of the role of the Catholic Church in education. He said that if parents wanted to send their children to a Catholic school, then it should have the right to Government funding if the school complied with the State curriculum.
Speaking at the Davos economic summit in Switzerland, Dr Martin said that religious schools of any persuasion should be State-funded if they met standards applied in other schools.
“I have no difficulty with Islamic schools, but the teachers have to be of the same calibre as teachers in any other school in the country and the Department of Education has a responsibility to make that happen,” he said.
Dr Martin said that the difficulty with this debate was that it was starting from an anachronistic position where 95 per cent of primary schools were run by the Catholic Church.
“I have no interest in being a manager of a school which is Catholic in name – that is not my business. I would like to see Catholic schools that are genuine Catholic communities for parents who want them,” he said.
He said that he wasn’t sure that “a simple monolithic structure” in education was the best.