THE Catholic Church is demanding control of a share of the new second-level schools planned for rapidly expanding areas, confidential papers reveal.The position paper shows that Church leaders are angry over being "sidelined" by the State from the planning of new second-level schools in recent years.
Dismissing suggestions that it is pulling out of education, the Church insists that parents must have the right to send their children to a Catholic secondary school, if they so wish.
And if that is not possible, then the State has to look at the possibility of using the transport network to "bus" children to faith schools, it suggests in the paper, which was sent to Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe.
Just two weeks ago, the Church demanded further involvement in primary schools. Now the four main Church education bodies have upped the ante, saying: "The Department of Education has mistaken the silence of religious trustees as a licence to exclude them from any consultation process".
The position paper -- seen by the Irish Independent -- discloses that of the 31 new second-level schools established between 1992 and 2007, only one was a Catholic secondary school. It has since closed.
All the rest were community schools or VEC-run community colleges.
But the Church says that new all-lay trusts, which are taking over religious-run schools, are ready to play a vibrant role in the provision of new educational facilities for the estimated 100,000 new pupils expected in primary and post-primary schools by 2013.
Sources said the Church did not want to run all new second-level schools, but wanted to get its "fair share" in "greenfield" areas.
New bodies such as the Edmund Rice Schools Trust, the Loreto Educational Trust and CEIST are eager to proactively engage in the trusteeship of new Catholic secondary schools, it says.
Three new community colleges are opening this year and three others are also planned for the rapidly expanding Dublin/Meath area.
The number of voluntary secondary schools has dropped dramatically from 461 in 1993/94, to just 393 this year, mainly because of amalgamations.
However, the amalgamations resulted in only four voluntary secondary schools, the rest were all community schools or colleges.
"From the perspective of Catholic trustees, these outcomes give a very clear, but far from reassuring, insight in to trends in educational development," says the paper, prepared by the Bishops' Commission on Education, the Association of Trustees of Catholic Schools, the Conference of the Religious of Ireland and the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools.
It says that, "even today, when choice of school is available to many, over 55pc of the cohort of pupils at second level attend schools under the patronage of Catholic trustees. Surely, this legacy cannot be overlooked, or written out of our educational system."
The paper says there is a lack of an open, transparent process prior to the allocation of new schools. Economic and cost considerations appear to be the only factors influencing the provision of new schools in the eyes of the department, it says.
"Catholic schools are communities with a characteristic spirit that permeates all aspects of school life, and the notion that this could be confined to religious instruction classes is a grave misconception.
"For these reasons, it is imperative that the Catholic school must retain the right to articulate its own values, without apology or reserve, and to expect all who manage and work therein to respect and uphold the stated values of the school."
The paper criticises media coverage which focuses on integration as the overriding value in education, and which waves the banner of non-denominational and multi-denominational systems as if they were pioneering inclusion.
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(Source: II)