Cuts in education - Subjects are key to job prospects

Repeated calls have been made down the years for greater emphasis on certain Leaving Certificate subjects including chemistry, physics, accounting, and economics, some of the educational ingredients deemed vital for Ireland’s future growth and development.

Undeniably, therefore, parents and pupils alike will be shocked by a survey showing that almost two-thirds of Irish secondary schools are considering dropping those subjects. It is hard to imagine a more backward step at a time when the thrust of education should be about enhancing rather than diminishing the range of subjects available to students.

According to ASTI, the secondary teachers’ union, the possible move is a boomerang effect of Budget 2012 which was a blatant Government smash and grab raid on already inadequate school resources to underwrite its penal austerity programme to bail out banks destroyed by reckless, and possibly criminal, activities of bankers.

The Government cuts included: axing 700 teaching posts this year; forcing schools to provide guidance services from within existing pupil-teacher ratio allocations; imposing a 2% reduction in capitation grants in 2012 and 2013 followed by a further 1% in both 2014 and 2015; and requiring a phased withdrawal of supports in some schools from earlier disadvantage schemes, pre-dating the current DEIS educational disadvantage programme.

Thankfully, in the face of strong criticism of those draconian cuts in these columns and elsewhere, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn performed a U-turn, reversing the planned cuts in teacher numbers at DEIS schools which, after all, are the very schools that cater for vulnerable children in disadvantaged areas. The irony is that such a hurtful cutback came from a Labour minister, the party that purports to support the needy and those struggling on the margins of society, a steadily growing proportion of Ireland’s population.

The survey commissioned by ASTI also found that schools are considering reducing students access to guidance counselling services as a result of Budget 2012. Seven in 10 schools are likely to reduce guidance provision by an average of 7.8 hours per week.

The question uppermost in the public mind is whether ASTI plans to use the findings as a form of political blackmail in a bid to extract further concessions from the Coalition, or as a cynical ploy to enable teachers avoid having to put their shoulders to the wheel at this difficult time in the country’s troubled economic and social history, a suggestion rejected out of hand by ASTI general secretary Pat King.

Whatever the explanation, there is no denying that if 64% of schools, or even one school, were to drop one or more of these subjects from their Leaving Cert programme it would be a highly regressive step and severely damaging to the job prospects of young pupils who enshrine Ireland’s hopes for the future.