For well over a decade, attempts to reform school patronage in Ireland have followed a disheartening pattern. Ambitious plans are announced and surveys conducted. Then obstacles arise and targets are quietly revised downward. The preliminary results of the national primary school survey, published yesterday by the Department of Education, represent the latest attempt to generate some forward momentum.
The structural case for reform is irrefutable. Ireland’s primary school system is the product of an era in which the State delegated ownership and management of publicly funded schools to private patrons, predominantly the Catholic Church. But Ireland has changed profoundly, and a system in which 88 per cent of primary schools have a Catholic ethos is plainly out of step with the society it serves.
Yet the history of divestment shows there are no easy solutions. The transfer of school buildings involves complex negotiations. Local communities have resisted change, even in areas where national surveys suggested an appetite for it. There is genuine ambivalence within families themselves. Many non-practising parents retain an attachment to religious patronage because they know what it entails and have not been persuaded that an alternative would be better.
This is not a simple binary issue. Some practising Catholics believe that schools which are nominally religious but serve communities largely indifferent to faith formation satisfy neither side. A smaller number of genuinely committed Catholic schools, they feel, would better serve those for whom religious education genuinely matters.
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The survey results are instructive. Approximately 60 per cent of parents in denominational schools wish to retain their school’s ethos. But a substantial minority do not, and the State, which funds the entire system, has a duty to meet that demand. That obligation has been acknowledged for 15 years but remains largely unfulfilled. A target of 400 multidenominational primary schools by 2030 was finally abandoned in the most recent programme for government, replaced with a vaguer aspiration to expand parental choice.
Worth noting are two further findings. Approximately 73 per cent of parents in single-sex primary schools favour a move to co-education, and 87 per cent of parents in English-medium schools want English to remain the primary language.
The school-specific reports due in May will be the real test. The national picture provides context but what ultimately matters is what each community decides. Minister for Education Hildegarde Naughton and her officials must find a way to avoid the paralysis and inertia that have dogged this process for too long. The pathway to patronage transfer needs to be genuinely navigable, with realistic and achievable timelines.
