Little understanding of how schools work

It is obvious now that the DES and the Minister for Education and Skills have little understanding of the logistics of running a school or of the level of essential support services necessary to help students following the decision to make career guidance teachers part of the normal staffing allocation.

The loss of this allocation is extremely serious as school management is now faced with the impossible choice of trying to maintain some of the essential guidance/counselling provision in the school or of removing important and essential subjects and programmes from the timetable due to the underhand and cynical change by the minister to the pupil/teacher ratio in second-level schools.

This change means that schools have less teaching staff and as a result many will find it impossible to provide the same level of class sizes, subject options, counselling, pastoral care and separate classes for higher, ordinary levels and foundation-level students going forward.