Call to close down Traveller centres

TRAVELLER training centres are the worst thing that ever happened to the Travelling community, it was claimed yesterday.

There are 33 centres nationally, teaching academic and practical subjects to Travellers aged over 15.

But the Travellers’ group Pavee Point said the centres only encouraged Travellers to drop out of mainstream education and called for them to be shut down.

Assistant director Martin Collins said: “It’s the worst thing, I think, that has ever happened to Travellers. It’s being viewed as an alternative to secondary education but to me it’s a sub-standard education and it needs to bedismantled, this network of training centres.” He said the allowance paid to those attending the centres was part of the problem.

“It’s absolutely a crying shame to see Traveller boys and girls at 15 or 16 who are doing quite well in secondary school, whereby the parents take them out and send them to the training centres for no reason other than that there’s a bloody allowance in it at the end of the week,” he said.

Around two-thirds of Travellers left school by age 15, figures released in 2002 showed. The national co-ordinator of the Traveller training centres was unavailable for comment.