Another fee-paying school joins free system

Newtown School in Waterford has become the latest fee-paying second-level college to join the free education scheme.

The Quaker-ethos school will join three others to have moved, or decided to move, to the entirely State-funded second-level system in recent years.

Principal Keith Lemon said pressure on families to meet tuition fees of over €6,000 had been a big factor in the move, which follows lengthy talks with the Department of Education.

“The truth of the matter is more and more parents have been struggling to pay the fees for their children to attend our school,” said Mr Lemon. “Moving to the free education system opens the school to more students while reducing the amount of money it costs for them to be educated here,”

He said the drop from a peak of around 350 students to just over 280 currently was mostly because fewer potential entrants could afford the fees.

Fee income has gone increasingly towards staff costs, due to major changes to public funding of the fee-paying sector in recent budgets. The department now only provides the cost of one teacher for every 23 students in the 55 remaining fee-charging secondary schools, compared to a 19:1 pupil-teacher ratio allocation for almost 700 other second-level schools.

The move follows a similar announcement earlier this year by Franciscan College, Gormanstown, Co Meath, and previous moves to the free scheme by Kilkenny College and by Wilson’s’ Hospital in Co Westmeath. The department said last night it is in talks with eight other fee-charging schools about possible moves to the free scheme.

Newtown opened in 1798 and caters for students from families in the Religious Society of Friends from around the country, but the majority are non-Quaker students. It has around 130 boarder students and will still offer fee-based boarding facilities.