Chance to grow school choice ‘lost in boom’
The Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector will report to Education Minister Ruairí Quinn later this year on how a greater choice of school types might be available to parents. A particular focus will be on areas where there is little or no choice outside the existing Catholic schools and insufficient population growth to warrant new schools being set up.
The Catholic bishops are patrons to almost 90% of the country’s 3,300 primary schools and have indicated a willingness to divest patronage where there is local demand and agreement.
But Fr Michael Drumm, chairman of the Catholic Schools Partnership, set up by the bishops and religious orders, said opportunities were lost when urban populations were expanding.
Instead of seeking to provide new schools, he said, the Department of Education simply asked Catholic schools to take more pupils from the early 1990s onwards.
“I’m aware of principals and boards of management who were forced to take extra classrooms against their will, some that have doubled in size. We didn’t take the opportunity we had then to cater for growing diversity in those communities,” he said.
Although Mr Quinn has suggested as many as half of Catholic primary schools could be offered to other patrons, ways to decide which schools could be transferred and who would become patron are among the key considerations of the forum.
The advisory group running the forum, chaired by John Coolahan, the former professor of education at NUI Maynooth, is expected to publish an interim report in November.
Another key question discussed at forum hearings in June was the role of schools in sacramental preparation.
Fr Drumm told the Irish Vocational Education Association (IVEA) congress in Cork that it is more a role for parishes, despite the historic link of preparation for First Communion and Confirmation with schools.
The IVEA is the umbrella body for vocational education committees (VECs), which have taken a role for the first time in primary schools in recent years, with five community national schools operating under VEC patronage on a pilot basis in Dublin, Kildare and Meath since 2007.
Marie Griffin, the chief executive of County Dublin VEC, said the approach has worked very well to date. The three schools under its patronage are open to children of all faiths and none, providing for religious education and faith formation during the school day for each faith group represented among the pupils.
Fr Drumm said it is important that the outcome of the forum enables forward planning in local communities to be driven by parents.
“I would far prefer to see area-based analysis, where we didn’t point to particular schools, and in a particular area we might say we’d all like to see a certain profile of school types. All partners in education would then work to achieve that over a certain period of time.”
Daire Keogh, senior lecturer in history at St Patrick’s College in Dublin, said an alternative to the rigid denominationalism in primary education is urgently required.
