Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 23 February 2012
10Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Minister for Education and Skills the way changes to staffing schedules announced in Budget 2012 will affect a school (details supplied), a two teacher Church of Ireland faith based school that may be forced to close should it lose one of its teachers. [10035/12]
View answerThe school referred to by the Deputy is a two-teacher school with 19 pupils. It will continue to be a two-teacher school in September 2012. Based on its current enrolment it will remain a 2-teacher school in September 2013. It may lose a teacher in September 2014. However, it can avoid this if its overall enrolment increases in the previous September to 20 pupils. This gives a lead-in period of more than one year - to September 2013 - to increase its enrolment to 20 pupils. Therefore, it is completely premature to say that the school concerned is at risk of closure. The Government recognises that small schools are an important part of the social fabric of rural communities. They will continue to be a feature of our education landscape. However, this does not mean that small schools can stand still or never have their staffing levels changed to something that is more affordable and sustainable for these difficult and challenging times.
The school itself has been open since 1903. The management sees a difficulty arising next year rather than this year. I presume it has an idea about the pupil numbers in that school for next year, which is why it is concerned about losing that second teacher. The school has already been amalgamated and 27 out of the 31 Protestant schools in Donegal are all facing this. That is replicated right across the country. I have met representatives from schools in Clare, Cork and across the State. They all say that the changes are affecting the Protestant minority schools.
Can the Minister of State postpone these changes until the value for money report is completed? We need to come up with some sort of alternative arrangement for these schools. We are decimating them at a time when the Protestant population is getting smaller and smaller. Many of these people left the State in the past but have a stake in these areas and want to stay there. One of the things that keeps them in those areas is the school to which they can send their children.
I have already made it clear that school communities should have no reason to feel that there will be a forced closure of their local school. No school closes because it loses a teacher. Small primary schools that had to close in recent years were those that were no longer viable due to falling enrolment. The enrolment in such schools had typically fallen below a total of eight pupils for two consecutive school years. The school to which the Deputy refers currently has 19 pupils. I set out quite clearly at the beginning that if it continues to have numbers of that order, it will retain its second teacher for many years to come.
For constitutional reasons, it is not possible to discriminate positively towards any particular religion or ethos, and the Department is obliged to operate the same staffing arrangements for Church of Ireland schools as any Catholic or any other type of school. I am sure the Deputy is aware that his colleague in Northern Ireland is questioning the educational attainment and standards available in the small rural school network in Northern Ireland. He has gone so far as to say that one would have to question the viability of any school operating with fewer than 100 pupils. We are making no such statement.
We also await the publication of the value for money report, which is due towards the end of next month. We can then begin the conversation on how we sustain and build upon the excellent tradition of education in rural Ireland. We must also look at how this challenge is being addressed in other jurisdictions, where we have similarly dispersed rural communities, such as Wales and Scotland.
We also need to look at how other jurisdictions deal with it. It has to be about education outcomes for children within those schools. It cannot be on budgetary issues alone. It must be about transport links, community links, a suitable premises and so on.
The problem is that we have already had an amalgamation here. Representatives from another school in Ardara came to me and told me that the nearest school was 50 km away in one direction and 22 km in another direction. We can only amalgamate so much, given the difficulties with transporting pupils from one place to another and so on. We need to look at how we can resolve this. I am open to looking at any solutions suggested. These people feel under attack. It is a slow attack, but it is undermining their ethos.
An attack on schools in rural Ireland is the last thing this policy aims to achieve. I come from rural Ireland and I attended a two-teacher school in rural Ireland. My mother taught for 42 years in the same school. I am not launching an attack on rural Ireland. We are trying to ensure that the quality of the education provided in every institution, be it from the two-teacher school to the 15-teacher school, is of the same standard and that pupils emanating from that system have the best possible education made available to them.
I do not agree with the Deputy that we have exhausted all the amalgamation opportunities at this stage. Perhaps we may have done so in some communities, such as those he mentioned. The publication of the value for money report will allow us to have that debate and discussion. It is reasonable to suggest that one solution may work in one part of rural Ireland and may not be the solution for the other part of rural Ireland. We will look at all those opportunities when the debate begins.
I support what Deputy Crowe said about the schools under the patronage of minority faiths. The amalgamation of those schools in my two counties is exhausted. If one or two of the remaining schools closed, it would not be possible to bring the children to another under the patronage of their own church.
The Minister of State and the Minister may have seen a joint statement by Father John Joe Duffy and by Reverend John Deane in Donegal, which outlined their concerns about schools under the patronage of the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian church and the Roman Catholic Church in Donegal. Doubt and concerns have set in. If the Minister of State can give reassurance to those people that their schools are not under threat, that would be a very good day's work.
The school I attended was amalgamated in rural Ireland when there were 24 pupils in the school. There are many more houses in that area now, but there are no children. If we amalgamate a school with another school in a more populous area, the young people will be taken from that original area and they will not go back. Sections of rural Ireland are being gradually depopulated by going down the road of amalgamation. Amalgamation has been exhausted. When amalgamation was brought in at the start, free transport was provided, but that is a thing of the past now. In many areas, there is no transport at all.
We have been anxious to point out from the very beginning that there will be no forced amalgamation of any rural schools or forced closure. I do not agree that the amalgamation options have been exhausted yet. I recall a colleague of mine saying in the Seanad last week that there were seven schools in his parish, consisting of an eight-teacher school, a smattering of two-teacher schools and a one-teacher school. There are opportunities and if they are to be taken up, it will be with the willingness and at the behest of local communities. That is something we stressed from the outset.
Deputy Smith raised some concerns regarding Church of Ireland rural schools. We are actively exploring opportunities with the Northern Ireland Minister with regard to discovering whether we might create a corridor along the Border so that students on both sides might traverse it to access the type of education which reflects the ethos in which they are being raised. Discussions in that regard are ongoing.
Exploration around all of these challenges will commence with the publication of the value for money report. I am not trying to pre-empt the report - the detail of which I am not familiar with - but in general it will praise the standard of education that is being provide in rural areas. In addition, it may offer some interesting solutions, which are not apparent at this point, in the context of how we should continue to provide this very high standard of education
