Schools ‘facing time-bomb of potential cases’

Niall Murray, Education Correspondent

Michael Moriarty, general secretary of the Irish Vocational Education Association (IVEA), said this country could be heading in the same direction as Britain, where compensation cases arising from school settings have reached almost 300 million a year.

The IVEA is the umbrella body for the country’s 33 Vocational Education Committees (VECs), which run 247 second-level schools and dozens of colleges in the growing further education sector.

“The State’s support in legislation for the rights of the individual has had a knock-on negative impact on the functioning and operation of the school, where school management feel increasingly frustrated by their restricted capacity to respond to gross disruption by a small minority of pupils,” Mr Moriarty told the IVEA annual congress in Carlow.

He said schools are open to potential litigation from pupils on one hand for not ensuring a bully-free environment and from employees, on the other, for not ensuring a stress-free environment.

Although such cases have been relatively few here so far, Mr Moriarty warned the growing crisis in schools will worsen unless the Government amends the 1998 Education Act, which has made it difficult for schools to sanction disruptive pupils. “The State must more fully realise its duty to support and ring-fence schools from the corrosive societal ills which prevail in some school environments. Failure to act now will mean the State will pay dearly,” he said.

The demand for legal amendments to give the greater balance of rights to well-behaved students has been raised by most submissions to the Task Force on Student Behaviour, set up by Education Minister Mary Hanafin, which is to make recommendations in the next month on measures which can be put in place in second-level schools next autumn.

The IVEA congress continues today, when Minister of State Síle de Valera is likely to come under pressure to increase staffing levels in the expanding further education sector, which has had resources severely curtailed in the last two years.