Fee-charging schools: Subsidy or saving for the State

The cuts we suffered in Budget 2009 have not been reversed in Budget 2010.

The removal of the ancillary grants which amounted to €2.8 million in 2009, has had a serious impact on our 21 schools, and we will lose a comparable sum in 2010.

The pupil teacher ratio (PTR) at 20/1 has meant we have fewer teachers in our 21 schools, however the revised Programme for Government negotiated by the Green Party has ensured that the PTR in all schools will remain unchanged for the duration of this Government. (But don't forget the Department of Finance told the McCarthy Report (an Bord Snip Nua) that they thought the PTR should move to 38/1 for fee charging schools and they lump us in with the Catholic fee charging schools, we need to decouple if our schools are to survive in the future).

The Committee is determined to keep working to make sure the issue stays uppermost in the minds of our politicians and the media, and we need your help to continue raising our community's concerns with local politicians and the wider public.

Many people have written to Batt O'Keeffe or other Fianna Fail TDs, and have received his standard letter in response. It is interesting to note how the content of this letter has been tweaked over the months and I attach a copy showing both the original and the revised version, along with a list of the contact the Committee has had with Ministers and TDs.

I am also attaching details of an exchange between Brian Hayes, Fine Gael Spokesperson on Education, and Batt O'Keeffe which took place on 1st December. You will see that yet again the Minister suggests that Protestant children get greater State support than Catholic children - this is a lie. He chooses to add the Capitation Grant to the Boarding Grant (to which every child in the State who lives more than 15 miles from a school of their ethos, is entitled), and simply divides the amount by two! The Block Grant is made up of the capitation for every child in our 21 schools less 6%, plus the Remote Areas Boarding Grant. We have explained this to the Minister on a number of occasions, on 21st October having gone through it step by step again, he said he did understand. Sadly he seems to have forgotten again.

These are tough economic times and we are willing to pay our share. However this needs to be equitable, we are not asking for special treatment, we are asking to be treated in parity. This government is coming between our children and their education. Removing government aid to our schools will prevent students from attending the school of their parents’ choice. We cannot allow this Government to dilute and ultimately destroy protestant secondary education. If this happens this Republic will be culturally poorer, narrower and a more embittered nation for that. It will leave our country with one less strand of colour and one voice fewer: we will all be poorer.

Once again thank you for your support - the Campaign goes on....

‘The Minister hides behind secret advice given to him about the charter of the people – the Constitution … Are we seriously to believe that the founding fathers and framers of our Constitution envisaged a situation where this Republic would become a hostile place for the children of the Protestant minority?’

On Friday 23rd October 2009, in a statement to parents, teachers and students to be made at the prize-day of Midleton College, Cork, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork - Bishop Paul Colton – will contradict the Minister for Education and Science’s version of the Protestant Schools’ dispute.


Text of Bishop Colton’s statement:


‘There has been much in the media since our last prize-day about schools such as ours. On this occasion when we celebrate the life of this school, and indeed schools like it, as Chairperson of the Board of Management, I take this opportunity to clarify one aspect of this sorry business.

Contrary to what the Minister for Education and Science has stated, the Bishops of the Church of Ireland, and those who work with us, have indeed responded to him since our meeting with him on 5th November 2008. Again and again, including in a Sunday newspaper article two weeks ago, in Dáil Éireann this week, in what has become a defensive mantra, the Minister says that he is still waiting to hear our proposals in response to the budgetary brutality and financial backstreet butchery inflicted on Protestant schools in last year’s Budget.

I want to tell you today that the Bishops of the Church of Ireland, in fact, wrote to the Minister on 2nd March 2009 asking him ‘…to endorse the long-established place of those schools within the free education scheme as ‘block grant schools’. This letter was copied to every member of Oireachtas Éireann. They all know, therefore, the truth of what I am saying. Other than a pro forma acknowledgment, the Bishops of the Church of Ireland have never had a response to that letter. Did we not deserve a response? Instead the Minister clamours for our response!

On behalf of the Bishops and on behalf of the Secondary Education Committee, on Thursday 7th May, Canon John McCullagh and I spent nearly two hours in a meeting with some of the Minister’s most senior officials. In a long and rambling discussion we repeated our request for reassurance that the block grant is secure and made the proposal that the situation which has pertained for over 40 years be restored – that is to say – that because of our special minority situation, our Protestant schools be treated, as before, as block grant schools, within the free scheme. This is our proposal.

These are just two of the formal occasions when we have stated this to the Minister. Clearly he chooses not to hear it. He does not understand. He hides behind secret advice about the document, not his alone, but the charter of the people of this country – our Constitution. Are we seriously to believe that the founding fathers and framers of our Constitution envisaged a situation where this Republic would become a hostile place for the children of the Protestant minority?

In case the Minister still has not heard it the message is this: we want our schools restored to the position they were delicately put in by his predecessor in 1967. The Minister talks of proposals. When someone, as the saying goes, ‘has you over a barrel’ (which is what this unilateral reclassification feels like to our schools) obviously it is naïve – disingenuous even – to talk of waiting for our proposals. Our proposal is this and for clarity I state it, yet again, publicly, we want our schools, in their uniquely difficult situation, restored to parity with schools in the free scheme, where they have been since free education was introduced 42 years ago!

- Ends –


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