Review of Small Primary Schools: 

A Government decision not to accept a report on small schools is good news for rural Ireland but its political handling is bad administration, says Education Correspondent Niall Murray

The Department of Education is not sure how many staff hours went into a report on small schools that, like so many others, will spend most of its life gathering dust.

Some of the detailed statistics and analysis of schools by size and cost should indeed, as Education Minister Jan O’Sullivan said earlier this week, prove valuable in future education policy development.

However, questions need to be asked about the political process that meant no public debate could take place on an issue of significant importance to large swathes of rural Ireland.

Even if its recommendations — for all-but-compulsory amalgamations or closures of dozens of one-teacher and two-teacher primary schools— were never going to be implemented, the investment of public servants’ time into the exercise was valid.

Every year, politicians on either side of the Dáil chamber and at committees fight for speaking time to criticise wasteful use of taxpayers’ money highlighted by the Comptroller and Auditor General. But where this week are the Government TDs, and particularly those on the Fine Gael benches, who fought for three years to have this latest report suppressed?

It was commissioned in 2010 by previous minister and Fianna Fáil tánaiste Mary Coughlan, but pressure from Fine Gael backbenchers on their ministers meant its publication and discussion never happened over the last two years. The document laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas and published on the Department of Education website yesterday is dated April 2013 — but Ms O’Sullivan’s predecessor and Labour colleague Ruairi Quinn first received a copy from his officials in June 2012.

There is little secret but that he wanted the difficult issues and possibilities within it debated publicly, even if it was clear that some of the recommendations for rationalisation might not wash with his Government partners.

Both Ms O’Sullivan and Mr Quinn repeatedly told opposition spokespeople, such as Fianna Fáil’s Charlie McConalogue, that they were anxious to publish the report. Last September, weeks after taking over at the department, Jan O’Sullivan told the Irish Examiner she was not yet sure when she would be publishing it, but that it would need Government approval.

“I’d like to think I’d publish it in an atmosphere where people had something positive, a context in which it could be discussed positively,” she said.

Anxious to play down the political tensions involved, the minister’s spokesperson highlighted this week how Labour TDs such as Michael McCarthy in Cork South West and Michael McNamara in Clare also had the minister’s ear on behalf of rural constituents. He said the report was commissioned and compiled at a time when budgetary constraints were a lot more severe than now, when the minister is hoping to increase investment in education.

The measures she did announce this week will not inordinately increase spending, but they have saved dozens of communities from losing a teacher in their local school in the next couple of years. Those staff might otherwise have been lost as a result of staffing changes introduced by Mr Quinn over three years, starting in September 2012.

More importantly, the fear of obligatory closure or amalgamation is lifted, as a scheme is being finalised under which patrons of one-teacher schools and those whose numbers fall below 25 will be asked to get those communities talking openly about their school’s viability. It will only happen where there is another school with the same patron and the same language of instruction, within 8km. In other words, Catholic and Church of Ireland schools, or a Gaelscoil and an English-language school, would not be expected to talk about merging.

Most crucially, the procedure will be entirely voluntary, therefore no compulsion to even talk about the topic locally. It is a far cry from the option put forward in Colm McCarthy’s 2009 An Bord Snip Nua report to merge hundreds of schools and cut hundreds of teaching jobs — although no account was taken of the knock-on extra accommodation and school transport costs.

The Catholic Primary School Management Association welcomed the measures, and general secretary Fr Tom Deenihan says plenty schools are open to facing facts about their future.

“The figures in relation to amalgamation and closure of rural schools in the last number of years indicate people are already grappling with these issues,” he told the Irish Examiner.

Department of Education figures do show that amalgamations increased from three or four a year from 2008 to 2010, up to nine in 2013. But Irish Examiner analysis also revealed that most schools that merged two years ago were larger schools, and only three amalgamations were by two schools that had more than 100 pupils each.

As Fr Deenihan says dozens of one-teacher and two-teacher schools are too isloated from their neighbours to expect children to travel 10 or 20 miles twice a day, which would happen if more wide-scale closures were pursued.

The minister said she has recognised the importance of the social infrastructure in which schools play a central role in rural communities.

Most of the 1,065 submissions received by the review steering committee highlighted those facts, and 11 meetings were held in the two years to September 2012 by the group that included eight senior Department of Education officials. It was chaired by Nama director and retired Fingal county manager Willie Soffe, who received a standard €1,800 review chair fee, and also included officials from the departments of Public Expenditure and Reform, and Environment, Community and Local Government.

“It is not possible to isolate the exact cost of the review in terms of work days by staff of the DES involved in the steering committee because the committee members undertook the review work as part of their range of duties. However, the review did involve considerable work,” a spokesperson said.

“As well as input from steering committee members, other staff of the department also worked to provide data on request and to provide support.”

There is enormous relief that their recommendations are not being given effect in communities around the country this week. But the pupils, teachers, parents of those schools and every other taxpayer in the country deserve better than to have the possibility of reasonable debate on extensive work by public servants quashed because of political concerns.

When Government ministers next take to the airwaves about public service reform and transparency, they should think twice about their record on this issue before boasting too much.

• The Value for Money Review of Small Primary Schools was not accessible from the Department of Education website homepage yesterday. However, it can be accessed from the Publications page: www.education.ie/en/Publications