Painful choices in the classroom

Education Correspondent Niall Murray gets a snapshot of how the budget might be considered in a typical school staffroom and, while the school and the characters are fictional, the figures are very, very real

IT feels like much longer, but it’s 11 years since Mary started working at St Aidan’s, a 600-student secondary school in the suburbs.

She’s glad she didn’t take that gap-year to see the world after college, because the guy who started teaching art the year after her at the school is being left go in September.