The Director of Education of the Conference of Religious of Ireland
has backed calls for the retention of educational supports for special
needs children, especially Traveller children, which are threatened
under cuts contained in the Government’s programme for national
recovery.
Sr Canice Hanrahan, RSM, was responding to concerns outlined by Fr
Derek Farrell of the Parish of the Travelling People in Dublin, who last
week said that cuts to resource and visiting teachers announced last
November are “likely to have a disproportionately detrimental effect on
Traveller children.”
If implemented, the reduction in resource posts outlined in
‘Withdrawal of Resource Teachers for Travellers posts at primary level
and of equivalent teaching hours for Travellers at post-primary level’
will result in the loss of almost 800 resource posts out of the 1,200
posts in Traveller Education at primary and post primary level by June
this year.
Sr Hanrahan, who retires this year as CORI’s Director of Education, told ciNews that
she would “strongly support the retention of supports that give
children, or at least try to give children, an equal opportunity.”
She
added, “There are inequalities into which people are born and we
shouldn’t make them worse by depriving them of the means of improving
their situation.”
Fr Derek Farrell described the proposed cuts as “grossly
disproportionate” and added that it is “staggering that the Department
had targeted two thirds of the cuts in resource teaching posts at
Travellers.”
“State investment in Traveller education, particularly through the
Traveller Resource and Visiting Teachers, has been increasingly
effective, but still needs to be consolidated,” he said.
The parish priest added, “These cuts to crucial supports are coming
at least a generation too soon. The timing and extent is unwise, and
there is clearly an issue of fairness and justice when of the 1,200 job
cuts in education, 773 of these are in Traveller education.”
Explaining why the cuts would be detrimental, he said, “What we are
particularly talking about are those children whose parents for
historical, social, cultural, and literacy reasons still may not be able
to give them the help they need at home with reading and homework.”
Fr
Farrell said these were children who desperately needed extra support
in school to realise their full potential.
“We’re also talking about young people who may be the first
generation in their family to go to secondary school, and who may well
drop out of school if they are not supported.”
Explaining that integration in school has been the national policy on
Travellers since 1996, Sr Hanrahan said it is important to recognise
that sometimes, due to lack of regular attendance, some might need extra
help and she regretted that the level of help previously available is
to be reduced.
“A school will need to have 33 Travellers before they
will get the concessions they used to get for smaller numbers before and
that is going to be difficult,” she explained.
The Mercy Sister said that CORI is supportive of calls to retain
supports for special needs of all kinds, not just Travellers, but also
children born outside the country who have no English.
“That’s a huge
problem for schools and a problem for the children themselves,” she
said.
She was speaking following an education seminar entitled Wisdom in the Service of Catholic Education Management which was held at Avila in Dublin last week.
One of the areas covered by the seminar related to the voluntary work
undertaken by up to 20,000 people on school boards of management.
Sr
Hanrahan told ciNews, “I don’t think the government appreciates the
extent of the voluntary contribution that the people of Ireland make to
education.”
Every one of the country’s 3,200 primary school boards has ten people
working in a voluntary capacity on it, while eight people work
voluntarily on all of the country’s secondary school boards.
While a school board is a statutory body recognised under the
Education Act, those who sit on them do so voluntarily and are not paid,
Sr Hanrahan underlined.
“It is a huge responsibility because of the legal obligations whether
it is health and safety, data protection, admissions policies, IT
policies ethos policies – the board is the body responsible,” she said.
Paying tribute to those who undertake this role, the CORI
representative said that if these volunteers weren’t there it would be a
huge economic challenge to the government to pay people to manage the
schools.