I serve on two school boards of management but would not claim to be an expert on education. I have, however, gained a degree of experience from serving on the boards of two community schools in the Blanchardstown area, each of which has over 1,000 pupils. The career guidance teacher in one of the schools recently wrote to all members of the board in what I can only describe as absolute desperation because he felt he was incapable of doing his job satisfactorily. He was the only ex-quota guidance teacher in his school with over 1,000 pupils. As the Minister knows, the Department's regulations authorise one full-time ex-quota teacher in a school of 500 plus pupils. It is worth acknowledging also the role of the community schools. One of our community schools has more enrolments than the vocational schools in counties Roscommon and Sligo combined.
Our present system appears to discriminate in relation to career guidance teachers and there seem to be huge anomalies in the area of clerical and administrative staff. Table 4 in the Minister's position paper on regional education councils gives a breakdown of clerical and administrative staff — I do not have the figures for community schools — and shows that the town of Bray with two schools and a total school population of 796, has seven clerical and administrative staff; Dún Laoghaire, with one school and 1,230 pupils, has 13 clerical and administrative staff; the town of Sligo with one school and 217 pupils has eight clerical and administrative staff and Wexford has one school with 655 pupils and six clerical and administrative staff. These figures simply refer to the clerical and administrative backup for those schools but I can tell the Minister that in the school to which I am referring, where there are over 1,100 pupils, there are only two secretarial and administrative staff. Those figures demonstrate glaring anomalies in deciding what kind of resources we give to schools.
I presume the Minister was at the ACS convention in Waterford. The ACS's own policy statement says they will press the Minister for Education to ensure that remedial teachers and career guidance counsellors shall be available ex-quota to all community and comprehensive schools, irrespective of size, and that there shall be two ex-quota career guidance teachers in each community and comprehensive school with over 600 day pupils. I am sure they made that case loudly and clearly to the Minister.
It is suggested that the quality of education suffers in schools of over 1,000 students. I was not sure on what that statement was based, but I am beginning to see the reality of it now in one of the schools on whose board I serve. First, second and third years in that school receive no counselling or guidance whatsoever. Fifth years receive counselling and sixth years generally receive mostly assistance with career choices and filling in CAO forms. I do not think that that is the Minister's intention or how she views the job of career guidance teachers and counsellors. The reality is that unless we have counselling and guidance, particularly counselling, available to first and second year students, we will build up a great deal of problems for ourselves in the future.
There are two vocational education committee schools in the area with much lower numbers which seem to have decided, as a policy, to keep the numbers at 600 or 700 pupils. This is high but not as high as the community schools. It appears to the staff and to me as an outsider that those schools which open their doors widest appear to be penalised by the system. They have taken in the extra numbers and the staff have agreed and co-operated. If we had to construct two 500 pupil schools in place of one community school it would be a huge burden on the State. However, instead of acknowledging that, we appear to penalise such schools in terms of resources.
I contend that the provision of support and, specifically, specialist staff such as counsellors and career guidance teachers should be consistent with the size of the schools and I hope that in her response the Minister will indicate some prospect of this. My understanding is that a suggestion that career guidance teachers or counsellors should be taken from in-quota is totally unacceptable to the schools. The present system appears, from the little bit of research which I have done and the reports which I have received, to be illogical and unfair and to discriminate against larger schools.
