School thrives after 60 years

One of Cork’s longest-running independent schools is celebrating its 60th year, but also the involvement of one of its founders who still plays an active role as she approaches her 88th birthday.

Mary O’Donovan grew up a few doors down from where she and Kathleen Cahill set up Scoil Mhuire at Wellington Road in the north inner city.

From the early days when a newspaper notice helped them open with 70 girls — a remarkable number in 1951, almost two decades before the introduction of universal free secondary education — the school has gone on to thrive with 450 students attending today.

Ms O’Donovan and Ms Cahill, who was also from Cork, had worked together at a teacher training college in Manchester, but both were eager to return home and set up a school here.

“There were lots of hoops to jump through starting out. We put girls into groups by their ages at first and separated them into different classes when the numbers grew,” she recalls.

They also opened a junior school for primary pupils two years later, which also still runs today, and Ms O’Donovan is the sole trustee of both schools.

Despite the introduction of free second-level schooling by education minister Donogh O’Malley 40 years ago, it was decided to continue charging students fees, as most others had been doing up to then, and Scoil Mhuire remains a fee-paying school.

“We had a big debate among ourselves; we were a lay Catholic school and we were afraid we’d simply be forced to close. The religious orders had money behind them, but we had nothing,” she said.

But even though there was wider access to free education, Ms O’Donovan says Scoil Mhuire’s numbers grew instead of dropping as might have been expected. “They wanted a quality education and while some people thought it was elitist, we just thought we wouldn’t continue to exist.”

The school prided itself, on what were innovative principles at the time, of short class periods and supervised study. The school has always had a Catholic ethos and principal Regina Moran says its motto of ‘Nurturing for Life’ instils teaching at Scoil Mhuire and all other activities.

The philosophy has clearly been filtered down from the early days when Ms O’Donovan and her co-founders set out with a very strong Catholic ethos. The 1950s, particularly in Cork city, were a period when many women set up independent schools without the assistance of the religious who had played a strong historic role in education.

Ms O’Donovan’s holds strong views of the changes in education and teaching and she agrees with Education Minister Ruairi Quinn about the need for major reforms.

“The points system was brought in to cope with the influx to third level that followed free secondary education. But now the points system is beginning to show its disadvantages,” she explains.

“One is the tendency of some schools to teach to the exam and that you could predict the exam, to some extent forced by grind schools and pushed by parents. The temptation is to prepare set answers or rely too much on rote memorisation, to the detriment of students thinking. You can’t slot thinking into a timetable, you have to angle the teaching and the classes,” she suggests.

But Ms O’Donovan is confident that Scoil Mhuire has a dedicated teaching staff who all know their subjects well enough.

Having retired as principal in the late 1980s, Ms O’Donovan spent a number of years after as school manager and, although both roles are now performed well by others, she is a daily visitor. She even gives the occasional assistance to students with their grammar and punctuation, having specialised in languages as a teacher of English, French, Latin, as well as religion.

“People are very kind to me here and I’ve made many friends among pupils and their families. I never wanted to give up teaching. I loved dealing with people all the time and especially seeing young people develop and meeting them later as mothers who send their children here.”

* A celebration of Scoil Mhuire’s 60 years is being held on Sunday next at the Everyman Palace, featuring music, song, dance and drama, along with memories of the school’s history.