Principal warns of fall-out from education cuts
BOARDS of management of second level schools will shortly be advised that subjects will have to be dropped and honours and pass students will require to be taught together.
So said the chairman of the National Association of Principals and Vice-Principals for Limerick, Clare and Kerry, Padraig Flanagan, head of Desmond College, Newcastle West, in an interview with the Limerick Leader.
He was speaking as good news had come through that his own school had had four projects accepted for January's national Young Scientist Competition.
Mr Flanagan said that the cuts in education spending were far more wide reaching than most people understood.
Cuts in grants and schemes would greatly affect transition year, Leaving Cert Applied, Leaving Cert Vocational and the whole junior cycle, he said, and all for the sake of saving just j3m nationally.
The pupil-teacher ratio expansion would mean schools losing one or two teachers in many cases and, in certain cases, up to five, he said.
Principals and vice-principals, whose jobs are mainly administrative, would find themselves increasingly in class, and all the more so because of the withdrawal of substitute teacher cover for uncertified teacher leave.
He predicted that the standards of Irish education, which had been improving over the years, would drop dramatically, and his association would do what it could to prevent that happening.
"We refuse to go back to having huge numbers in the hall," he said, referring to the gymnasium and the possibility of classes being sent there because of the absence of teachers to take lessons.
He said that that, in turn, would impede the games which were so much a part of the school's activities.
Other cutbacks are in the area of discretionary book grants for needy children, English language support teaching and the fact that schoolbus charges are increasing.
All of these, taken together, could well cause some young people to give up on education or to have them taken out of school by their hard-pressed parents, said Mr Flanagan.
"Substitution is the area of really major concern," he said, and described the atmosphere of anger at a meeting of principals and vice-principals from his three counties which was held in Adare.
"We are looking at a situation where schools will have to pay substitute teachers and will have to find the money to do it," he said.
Mr Flanagan said that we had educated ourselves out of economic difficulty in the past and could do so again, but that wholesale cuts in education spending "is a blunt instrument which defeats the entire purpose".
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Weather for Limerick
Tuesday 22 May 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 13 C to 19 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 12 C to 19 C
Wind Speed: 21 mph
Wind direction: South east
