High prices another way of protecting the social elite

LIKE Steve Staunton at the start of an ill-fated stint in charge of the Boys in Green, Mary Coughlan can — for the foreseeable future — tell teachers, their unions and their schools: “I’m the gaffer…”

Oh, but that’s only when it comes to things like the curriculum, pay scales and how much they’re going to have to raise at cake sales and bingo each year.

But a simple thing like instructing schools not to impose huge costs on their kids with uniforms, it seems, is way too much control.

Year after year, cases are reported in these pages where the minister of the day and his or her officials march down to the Four Goldmines and spend our hard-earned money telling judges: “That’s not our problem, they’re all independent entities in law, and we can only tell them some of the things they must do. The rest is a matter for, well, someone else, M’lord.”

And then we all bemoan the state’s lack of control in our schools and forget about it again for a while.

For an awful lot of things, the law may well be correct and true. Maybe we shouldn’t have the Government or the EU telling schools: “Thou shalt (or shalt not, as the case may be) teach about evolution (insert creationism)” or some other such.

State regulation is a cause of much anxiety in this country at present (apart from its absence for way too long in our financial services sector). But there are some areas in which it can surely have no negative effect, except possibly on institutions that decide (silently, behind closed doors) that those doors should only be opened to a certain few.

Like it or not, costs like uniforms and school tracksuits and pinafores with badges, and coats with Roger-the-Rugby-Playing-Rabbit, raise barriers to inclusion because families who have the Constitutional right to have their children educated where they see fit are not going to choose the school where they can’t afford the geansaí or shoes.

The Government tells us it cares deeply about ensuring schools can’t cherry-pick, and the focus in recent years has been on suggestions that children with special educational needs are gently nudged around the corner to the school with all the facilities to meet their every requirement (translated: we don’t do special needs, good luck and thanks). But segregation on a social (financial, let’s face it) basis is clearly still a big issue in this country and if Mary Coughlan or any of her successors cares about such matters, perhaps they could make a start by telling some schools to cop-the-hell-on with their outlandish uniform lists.

No child should be stopped from going to any school next week in a comfortable, respectable set of clothing that meets certain minimum criteria because it doesn’t come from Shop A or match Colour Code Z. These kids will have enough of meeting such specific requirements if they get out the other side and try getting into college.

Lord knows, their parents will probably have to start saving for that day almost immediately so why not give them a chance to do so because, for a sadly growing number of them, the idea of putting a few bob aside every week right now is as reasonable as their chances of bringing Tiger Woods to the 18th in a matchplay competition on a windy Saturday in Ballybunion.

There may be little chance of a bailout for mortgage holders or any other of our citizens but the Government could have a role to play in saving a few quid on school clothing.

Bunny Carr’s TV appeal to help the Gorta charity in the 1980s was never truer: “Give a little, it’ll help a lot.”