Fee-paying pupils are collateral damage in phoney school class war
The State created the schools. No-one else is to blame that we have State schools that have fees — “private State-aided schools”, as the Department of Education’s Fee Charging Schools: Analysis of Fee Income report puts it.
The Government might push the pupil/teacher ratio in these schools still higher in the next budget. Their pupil/teacher ratio is already four higher than that in schools which don’t charge fees. But the cut can still be passed off as a killer blow in the class war to some elements in Labour and their media cronies. Which means it is relatively easy to pick money off the schools. In fact, McCarthy recommended in 2009 that their pupil/teacher ratios should go a full 10 kids higher than that which obtains in free schools.
There is an appalling dishonesty in this because fee-charging schools are not really private schools. They are part of the fabric of communities. In some areas they are just the local schools to which the local national schools feed.
Ordinary families calculate they can afford them for different reasons. Maybe they have just one child, born late. Maybe they have two jobs and no mortgage. Maybe the grandparents are stumping up. Maybe the girls have gone to the excellent free convent and mam is waitressing in the local pub to pay fees for the one son. I know this woman.
It was the Labour Party which abolished university fees in 1996 and this led to a big rise in the numbers at fee-charging schools. Which then bagged as may of the free university places as possible.
But the financial calculations made by ordinary families on the basis of modest fee rises may be blown apart if the fees are hiked up too far to substitute for a collapse in State provision.
The schools could apply to enter the free scheme. But the families have no control over that decision and meanwhile they face the stark choice of trying to make their money stretch or taking their children out of school. Which few want to do. Because as far as kids are concerned, it’s the nuclear option.
They are collateral damage in a phoney class war. Their parents were breaking no rules when they enrolled their kids in these schools. On the contrary, they were simply availing of what the State had provided in their area. The fault lies, not with parents or with children, but with the State, which is surely alone among developed countries in allowing State schools to charge fees.
Donogh O’Malley’s decision to provide free secondary education in 1967 was one of the most positive decisions ever made by a minister of this State. But kow-towing to the Protestant community in the wake of that decision was one of the most stupid mistakes, and it is the reason we now have State-funded, fee-charging schools.
The Protestant schools argued that they had to stay out of the free scheme because they had to pay their lay teachers higher salaries than the State afforded. This meant that some other schools stayed out too and led to the situation whereby there were 55 fee-charging schools, 20 of them Protestant.
O’Malley went still further, making a special case for Protestant schools by paying them a support services grant and also allowing them to charge fees. So the situation remained, with Protestant children uniquely supported by the State to go to fee-charging schools, until 2009, when their support services grant was withdrawn by then-Minister Batt O’Keeffe. He was accused of discrimination, but his decision is backed up by this year’s Analysis of Fee Income report which says Protestant fee-charging schools should be treated like all the others.
Which leaves me wondering why it has taken all this time for anyone to ask the most basic questions about Protestant education. I am left suspecting that the State regards Protestants with such fear and suspicion that it prefers to shut the door and not enquire what is behind it not matter how much it costs. Why does no one ask the Protestant, fee-charging concerned about inclusion why they don’t enter the free scheme?
Two have, Wilsons’s Hospital and Kilkenny College. It is now reported that as many as 12 of the other fee-charging schools have opened negotiations with the Department of Education with the aim of doing the same.
The headmaster of Kilkenny College, Ian Coombes, said it was the only way for them to continue their “mission.” That’s a welcome note of Christianity in the midst of all the bleating about the cuts to fee-charging schools meaning the end of the Protestant community as we know it. One parent, Julie Carr, wrote in a newspaper that “increasing numbers are being forced, with heavy hearts, to send their children to schools in the free system which are not of the Protestant ethos.”
What is the “Protestant ethos” for a start? Doctrinally the Church of Ireland is easily as close to Roman Catholicism as it is to Presbyterianism, or any other low church. What distinguishes a “Protestant” school apart from the fact that it is not Catholic?
I’VE missed the point, as usual. Not being Catholic is these schools’ main selling point. This is the reason they often rejoice in many students from diverse religious backgrounds, which was one of the great benefits of my time at a Protestant school. But I still don’t think promoting Protestant schools is the most logical way to go about promoting multi-culturalism.
O’Malley should have looked at some of these questions back in 1967. But the answers would have cost money. They would have meant more expensive comprehensive schools. They would have prised open the whole question of religious patronage. And the State was neither ready nor willing to do that.
And still isn’t. Fianna Fáil’s Charlie McConalogue warns “if these schools come into the free fees system, it will cost the State more money.”
Is that still the only consideration, nearly a half century later? The €23 million annually it would cost to ban the practice of charging fees in State-funded schools?
Yes? Fine. Times are tough. I understand. But don’t try dumping on fee-charging schools in the next Budget. Stay away from their pupil/teacher ratio. Stay away from ordinary kids in schools you put there because you wouldn’t put your hand in your pocket to fund an inclusive education system.
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