Schools have lost over 20% of grant income, say boards

BUDGET cuts have resulted in schools losing over 20% of their total grant income, with some losing as much as €60,000 in a full year, according to the representative body for the boards of management of almost 400 secondary schools in Ireland.

Noel Merrick, general secretary of the Joint Managerial Body and the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary schools, warned that their smaller schools were facing extinction.

“When one considers the outstanding service that these schools have given to their communities at minimum cost, it would be an outrage if they were pushed into closure,” he said.

Mr Merrick, who was speaking at the organisation’s annual conference in Killarney, Co Kerry, said the abolition of the transition year grant and the abolition of grants for other programmes would not only threaten these programmes, but would leave schools with a serious shortfall in funding.

And, he said, schools that had lost their disadvantage status had already paid a severe penalty for their success because they were losing the remaining extra teaching staff and extra grants on top of the cuts that affected all schools.

Mr Merrick said the change in pupil/teacher ratio would have a huge effect on mainstream provision in the form of worsening class size and on the range of subjects on offer. And, even where subjects remain, the choice of subjects would be affected.

The organisation’s general secretary, Ferdia Kelly, gave three examples from voluntary secondary schools of varying size to show the total annual loss incurred as a result of cuts made in the October budget.

A school with more than 838 pupils lost €64,000; a school with 429 pupils lost €27,573, while a school with 206 pupils lost €6,581.

“The severity of the impact of losses of this nature must be seen in the historical context that a voluntary secondary school received on average €90 per annum less in public funding than schools in the other two post-primary sectors,” he stressed.