Government ‘abandons’ vow to cut class sizes

THE Government was accused yesterday of abandoning a commitment to cut school class sizes according to international standards.

As parties in the Dáil focused on next month’s Meath and Kildare North by-elections, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte accused Education Minister Mary Hanafin of abandoning a pledge in the Programme for Government to reduce average class sizes to 20 pupils per teacher for children aged under nine.

In Meath and Kildare, the Dublin South West TD said the Government had failed to reach its target in most schools and one Meath school had the second largest class in the country.

“There are more than 100,000 children catered for in classes that exceed 30, in the 30 to 39 category,” he said. “Obviously children in the bigger schools suffer most and if you were to look at, for example and for no particular reason, Kildare and Meath, you would find the Government has reached its target in 4% of the cases in Kildare ... and 10% in Meath fall into the Government’s target.

“In fact, 37% of all pupils are taught in classes in Kildare of between 30 and 39 and 34% in Meath. Indeed Meath has the second largest class size in one case in the entire country where there are 44 children in the class. So there has been no move at all on class sizes. It appears the new Minister for Education has retreated from this. She described this on a television programme where I saw her as ‘a noble aspiration’.”

The Taoiseach insisted the Government was making good progress in reducing class sizes and was focusing particularly on schools in disadvantaged communities.

“What we have done in the last number of years is put our resources into special needs and to disadvantaged education, because I think Mr Rabbitte would accept that all areas are not equal. Just taking the mix of the entire population of the country into the number of teachers and saying that is the class size for the country is flawed thinking.

“The class sizes in special needs is one to 15 and one to 20, so it is far lower in those areas and so it should be. I think it would be a sad situation if we were just to get down to 22 or 23 everywhere. I think it is better that we try to target the resources.”