Parents and schools criticise cuts to capitation grants

Parents and school boards have criticised the move to use primary school budgets to part-reverse cuts to teacher numbers at disadvantaged schools.

Ruairi Quinn, the education minister, has taken €2.5m from the capitation grants paid to all 3,200 primary schools so he can fund the retention of 235 teachers at over 130 schools in his department’s Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools programme.

They were some of 428 jobs that schools had kept from disadvantage schemes pre-dating that scheme, but which were under threat of being taken away from September.