Principal: They are playing with the future of children’s education

For Gerry Lynch, keeping the number of resource teaching hours he had last year is little consolation.

As Rahan National School finished classes for summer, the teaching principal was still trying to assess the implications. He will now have 6.8 hours a week instead of the six hours he would have been limited to under the cuts reversed by Education Minister Ruairi Quinn on Tuesday.

The difficulty is that, instead of the two children those hours were used to give specialist teaching during the past year, the school must spread those 6.8 hours among four children. Two new pupils have moved into the area, a few miles from Mallow in north Cork, but their resource teaching allocation will not move automatically with them.

“It’s not their fault, but the way the system works, we can’t even apply for hours for them until they’re formally enrolled in the school which we can’t do until the end of August,” explained Gerry, one of three class teachers in the 69-pupil school.

“Even if we could, the NCSE closed applications in March, so we don’t know yet when the next round of applications will be looked at and decided,” he said.

The difficulty is that, with the 500 resource teachers the Cabinet has allowed Mr Quinn to make available — meaning schools get the same 85% of recommended hours for children with disabilities instead of 75% proposed a week ago — will mean no more can be provided to schools before year’s end.

“There is some relief in the news of a turnaround, but we’re still down to 85% of what they’d have got three years ago, all we’re doing is going back to where we were for the past year. But the two pupils we currently have should be getting eight hours resource teaching between them,” said Gerry.

Another complication is another Department of Education rule which means he can not combine the school’s hours of learning support teaching with its resource teaching allocation. With nearly 15 hours a week granted to the school for one-to-one and in-class support for children with less severe learning difficulties, Gerry would ideally give almost a full-time post to one teacher.

Instead, he must share a resource teacher with two other schools, while the learning support teacher also spends time travelling to and from two other schools in Mallow.

“We’ve had three different resource teachers for the last three years, because understandably people look for a more fixed position somewhere else. But working with children with disabilities, routine is a key element, and it takes time each year for children to build a relationship again with a new resource teacher,” he explained.

The frustration of last week’s announcement, followed by the Government capitulation to public pressure on the issue of resource teaching hours, sums up for Gerry how the system works.

“They’re playing with the future of children’s education. They say it’s economics, and then they say it’s educational, but somewhere in between, it’s all politics.”