A “Love” Letter to the New Minister for Education

Simon Lewis
9 min readJan 23, 2025
Canva’s AI attempt at me writing a love letter!

Despite my detective work, it looks like I was completely wrong about who the next Minister for Education was going to be and it seems that we will have Helen McEntee as our education minister before today is out. Given the twists and turns in the Dáil already, anything could change, but I’m guessing by now, it will be her.

I hope readers don’t take this the wrong way, and maybe this tells me how little I believed the ministry means in terms of importance to politicians, but I honestly didn’t consider McEntee for the ministry simply because she is the Deputy Leader of Fine Gael, and I expected her to be given a more senior position. The fact that McEntee is most likely to be given the role says to me that perhaps I am wrong. In my view, it is a big deal for the Deputy Leader of a political party to take on the portfolio, and I may be over-optimistic, but it might mean that the last almost decade of neglect of education could finally come to an end.

Of the top ten people I was most excited about being the Minister for Education from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, I had hoped it would have been Jennifer Carroll-McNeil for the simple reason that she was a politician on the rise. Her elevation to Health suggests that the leadership agree. Despite a rather shaky term in Justice, I still feel that McEntee is someone who is on the rise within Irish politics and this move to education will possibly be a place where she can relaunch herself. This makes me hope that the next few years might be interesting. McEntee, if she is brave, could potentially do a 21st century Donagh O’Malley.

This “love” letter is a list of things I would love to see happening in primary education.

I would Love the Minister to Tackle Patronage

I don’t think it would come as any surprise to anyone that this would be my first love. The patronage system is long past its sell-by-date and I am beginning to explore more deeply how it affects almost every aspect of the primary education system. In some ways I think the reason it hasn’t been looked at is because it is generally divided along religious lines. This causes emotional reactions.

The last few weeks have demonstrated that the patronage model goes well beyond religion. It’s really interesting how Storm Éowyn gave the ability for the State to insist schools close for the day but the same couldn’t happen for the snow a couple of weeks before. In neither case were the Department of Education allowed to tell schools to close. For the storm, a red weather warning, it was the National Emergency Coordination Group that made the decision. For the snow, because it was an orange warning, the same group didn’t have the authority to close schools but neither did the Department of Education. As usual it came down the line to individuals because, “it is a matter for all individual schools.”

The new Minister needs to address how the patronage system affects everything from legal religious discrimination to more efficient coordination on policies and procedures. For example, on the latter, every school is going to have to produce its own anti-bullying policies for the Bí Cineáilte framework, despite them being all the same. The Department of Education have no power to produce the policy for all schools. All of them have to adapt it. Similarly, a few years ago, the NCSE were given new powers by the Department of Education to force schools to open special classes. In order for that to happen, the Department had to ask patron bodies to ask their individual schools to change their policies to allow themselves be forced to be open special classes. If the patron refused, I’m not sure what the Department could do, particularly if it was the Catholic bodies, given they control 90% of schools.

With that in mind, this is where there is a significant potential problem should the government wish to push through some policies to primary schools in Ireland. Should the Catholic Church be against any policy, they probably hold the power if they choose to do so. No other patronage probably has that power. All the Department of Education can do is withhold funding from the patron but while I think they’d have no issue doing that to a smaller patron, I don’t think they’d try it with the Catholic one. It’s interesting that the only time I’ve ever heard the Department of Education withdraw funding was for a Muslim School.

I would love the new Minister to get a group together to look at the structure of patronage and come up with a long term plan to changing it. I could write a full book on this but I will move on.

I would Love the new Minister to sort out Special Education

If the new Minister thinks opening up as many special classes and special schools is all it’s going to take to sort our special education, she is going to fail spectacularly at rebuilding her brand. The neglect of Special Education has been ongoing since the recession and it needs to be addressed quickly and as soon as possible.

Any system that was brought in from 2011 to 2016 needs to be examined, such as the 20% cut to resource hours which was never reversed and remains in place through the SET Allocations Model.

The Minister will also have to look at the decisions made since 2017, which were no better, especially the SET Allocation Model and Frontloading Models. While there are some green shoots with the frontloading model, the SET Allocation Model remains a complete mess based on junk data and over 90% of schools not receiving enough resources for the children in their care.

On top of all this, schools need proper therapeutic wrap around services. For me, this is what makes successful countries stand out. There was nothing amazing about their teaching. When I went to Finland, every school had a psychologist, social worker and nurse on site. In Ireland we need something similar — perhaps speech and language therapists and occupational therapists would top the list of needs.

I have argued that Special Education will be the scandal of the 21st century and if the new Minister can stop that from happening, she would be well in line for accolades.

Leadership Supports

If there’s one thing the IPPN has done in the last few years, it’s to highlight that primary school principals suffer double the amount of stress and mental health issues of the national average. It’s quite mad that the Department have yet to do anything concrete to help, despite the promises in the Programme for Government.

While the IPPN are rolling out a rather strange series of seminars on making the job doable, given they argue that it isn’t sustainable, the Department have yet to make any assurances of anything they are going to do. The focus now needs to be on reducing workload. Ever since I got involved with the IPPN and also the National Principals’ Forum, every single survey, more or less, indicated that workload is the biggest priority for principals.

I would also suggest that the new Minister needs to stop drip feeding the positions of responsibility back. She simply needs to restore them all in one go. The INTO should never have lifted their directive until all positions were back in place and the stress that has been caused by this drip feeding is not fair.

Back to Focus on Teaching and Learning

When I’ve been asked the biggest difference I’ve noticed in primary education, I give the example of when I was last in the classroom. Back then I probably made 2 phone calls to parents a year. These days, teachers make 2 a day. Teachers are spending so much of their day tackling non-teaching issues, whether that’s unnecessary paperwork, dealing with increased behaviours, and replying to constant streams of emails. I’m leaving a lot out in that list.

So much is expected of teachers and very little of it has to do with education. The new curriculum is such a disappointment. What could have easily been a revolution of 21st century learning is merely a small tweak to the 1999 curriculum, even with the new subjects. So much more could have been achieved and it simply wasn’t.

The Department of Education has spent the last five years turning primary education into a childcare service. That’s not taking anything away from childcare, it’s just not what primary education is. Initiative after initiative has been focused on benefitting parents rather than children, whether it’s free school books or free school meals or free school transport, everything seems to be focused on parents’ pockets rather than children’s brains.

Teachers were rarely mentioned by the Minister for Education when she was making announcements and this is something that needs to change. I can’t believe I am about to type this but: teaching is central to good outcomes for education. When we are preventing teachers from teaching, we are in big trouble.

I would love for our new Minister to ensure that teaching becomes central to the role of the teacher. Anything that is important but unrelated to teaching needs to be given to someone else.

Teaching Assistants

I would love for the Minister for Education to announce a new post — the Teaching Assistant.

This possibly links with the previous point but it is madness to believe that for 21st century learning to happen that it can be done by one person. There are so many conflicting needs going on in every primary school classroom in the country that one person simply can’t manage them. For example, when a disagreement takes place on yard, this takes huge time away from teaching and learning. For example, if some children are really struggling with a concept, a teaching assistant could help work with other children in the classroom. For example, if a phone call needs to be made to book an appointment with a parent… you get the point. The new Minister for Education needs to look into this urgently.

Tackle the lack of Diversity in Teaching

99.7% of primary school teachers are white and Irish. This compares very poorly with almost every other job in the country. I think the Dáil may be the only workplace that is less diverse.

I am still the only mainstream primary school principal in Ireland from an ethnic minority and I often joke that I’m not even a good example because everyone that sees me assumes I’m not. Visually I am also white and Irish. To me this is crazy. However, I don’t believe it isn’t by design.

The entire structure of our primary education system make it really difficult for diversity to happen. Yes, we have a few teachers coming through the system now but it’s nowhere near enough. These teachers are still the only ones in their year group, rather than being representative of society. Those who speak to the media admit they are unlikely to find employment easily due to the obstacles in place in Ireland. On top of this, for whatever reason, people cannot see past diversity equalling migrants, and that it will take time for them to progress into the system. It’s nonsense. We have two generations of native Irish people who come from diverse backgrounds.

I would love the new Minister to start taking the lack of diversity in our system seriously. Of all the issues I’ve mentioned, to me, this is the easiest one to tackle. It is a shocking failure of everyone involved in the education system that we are still in this situation, especially the trade union movement who should be leading this, so a Minister that takes this on will reap the rewards.

If we want to have an equal society, we need to embrace diversity and where better to focus than in education.

There are obviously lots of other areas that the new Minister needs to consider — funding, climate change, biodiversity, technology and much more, but I hope this gives a flavour of where I’d love to see change. I’d love to hear what you think.

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Simon Lewis
Simon Lewis

Written by Simon Lewis

Primary school principal, podcaster and poet. 👨🏼‍🏫 Writes about the Irish primary education system. Tweets from @simonmlewis

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