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.
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