My Educational Election Manifesto for 2024
Don’t worry, I haven’t put myself forward for the election on November 29th — you already put up with enough of me. I admire anyone that puts themselves forward to the people of their country, and whether or not, I agree with their policies, it’s a brave and vulnerable thing to do. I don’t think I’d survive a single day in the world of politics, for a whole host of reasons, so I’m going to have to make to with a blog post of theoretical policies I would propose if I was able to lead the education portfolio. As always, I only focus on primary level so if you are interested in second level, I’d recommend taking a look at Humphrey Jones, Julian Girdham and Conor Murphy, who are talking lots of sense.
The INTO have gone with 30 election manifesto items but I’m going to focus on only three areas for mine: Patronage, Special Education and Funding. I was going to go with a fourth — that is teacher supply — but the area is quite complex and I believe it rooted in other areas — including the three areas I’ll be talking about. I’ll likely mention teacher shortage in all three areas. I have written about the teacher shortage crisis here:
Patronage
No one that knows me would be surprised to hear that if I could make one change to the education system, it would be to scrap patronage. I talk about it incessantly, to the point that I’m sure people avoid me in the street. However, I genuinely believe that if there is a single root of all the problems in the education system, despite it being a very complex system, removing patronage completely from the education system would unravel a large percentage of these issues.
I think when people hear me speak about this, they tend to focus mainly on religion. This isn’t surprising because 96% of patron bodies are religious in their nature, and I do think this is absolutely crazy in a modern 21st century republic where religion plays no part in the daily lives of the vast majority of people’s jobs. The fact that a primary school teacher must agree to effectively become a Missionary in most denominational schools by leading prayer, preparing children for religious rites of passage, and providing unobjective faith forming lessons is nothing short of bizarre, and unique in most parts of the world. It may even be unique in the world.
However, I want to look beyond religion here because when I say I would like to remove patronage for the education system, I mean all patrons — not just the religious ones. There are a handful of non-religious patrons in Ireland. Most will know of Educate Together and the ETB’s Community National School model. However, there are others — An Foras Pátrúnachta, Saplings, Scoil Sinéad and others. The patron’s main job, and perhaps their only job, is to create what’s known as the “characteristic spirit” of the school, whether that’s the religious leaning of the school, the language of the school, etc.
However, to me, a patron body acts more as a buffer that simply aids the State in dodging their responsibilities of providing a properly functioning education system.
The Constitution, at the moment, states that the government “provides FOR education” and that tiny 3-letter word is why we have a patronage model. The State is responsible for providing money to patron bodies to run their network of schools. The Patron’s job is to oversee a network of Boards of Management, which is essentially a group of eight well-meaning people, who all voluntarily manage all aspects of one school each. Because of this model, every school is a private entity. To me, this is where the root of everything lies.
Schools, in many ways, are no different from businesses. Despite being about 95% the same as each other, they are all competing with each other for survival. Their income is dependant on the number of children attend their school. The number of staff they have depends on the same. The creates a system where if there is more than one school in a particular area, they are all vying for the same children in order to survive. Whether or not the schools have the same patron body over them or not, in most cases, they are still competing with each other. However, when you add the ingredient of patronage into the mix, it adds another layer of competitiveness.
Catholic schools, for example, which are the vast majority of schools try their best to be everything to everybody, and in some ways I feel they do a good job of pleasing the majority of people — essentially most Catholic schools right now — they run a gauntlet of being not too Catholic and being Catholic enough — to please both their patron and their clients. (When I say clients, I tend to mean parents, rather than children, because it is the parents that decide in what school their child enrols.)
The majority of clients are what can, kindly be called, cultural Catholics — they don’t really believe in the tenets of the Catholic Church but lack the rites of passage — the hatches, matches and dispatches — as many call them. They can effectively outsource two rites of passages to a school — namely Communion and Confirmation — without having to take any responsibility for preparing their children for these sacraments.
For clients that want their child to speak Irish, again they can outsource this to the school, as many do, without having to take any responsibility for learning the language themselves. It strikes me as very interesting the number of parents that enrol their children into Gaelscoileanna but then send them to an English-medium secondary school.
While the above two examples infer a gamification of the patronage system, where parents use the system to gain a perceived advantage for themselves, parents that don’t have choices, that is generally anyone that doesn’t subscribe to Catholicism, wherever they are on the spectrum of devoutness, the patronage model is a lottery. For a Muslim family that want a Muslim school for their child, unless they live in Dublin or are willing to travel to Dublin, the patronage model is no use to them. For a family that need to send their child to a non-religious school, for example, they have to hope that they live in a area where there might be such a school. In Ireland in 2024, there are current 3 counties where there isn’t a single non-religious primary school. Almost half the counties in Ireland have less than two.
However, religion aside, the patronage model has an effect on all sorts of things — bus transport, insurance, special education, and more. For example, on bus transport, my child doesn’t attend his two most local primary schools because they are both of a religious ethos. Because the nearest school that matches our conscience is over 6km from our house, we are entitled to bus transport to the school. I think this is a shocking waste of money.
School insurance is another mad one. Schools are grouped by insurance companies by their patron body or dioceses. This means that if you happen to go to a school in one diocese, your school could be paying more insurance than a school that is part of An Foras Pátrúnachta or vice versa. It’s baffling that this happens, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe me, but it’s absolutely true.
I could go on and on and on, and by now I imagine you can see why I obsess over patronage and can talk about it incessantly. To me, patronage causes more problems than solutions. If we scrapped patronage, children would simply go to their nearest primary school. This would allow the Department of Education to plan education properly because they would know exactly which children would be going to which primary school well in advance. As you can imagine, this would make things much easier when it comes to planning for special education and so on. Speaking of which…
Special Education
I think if you asked all 3,200 primary school principals what their top 5 concerns were in the sector, I’d be shocked if 1% of them would say patronage. On the other hand, if 100% of them didn’t say special education, I wouldn’t believe you. I don’t think there is a single primary school in Ireland that hasn’t been affected by the collapse of supports for children with additional needs over the last two decades in Ireland.
I dedicated a six-part podcast episode to the subject where I tried to figure out where it all went wrong.
Essentially, there is a huge mess that needs to be fixed very quickly as we have already condemned a generation of children, who didn’t get the resources and help they needed to manage the education system, and beyond the education system.
For me, every classroom needs to have a Teaching Assistant, as well as a teacher so that low level needs can be managed within the classroom.
After that, every school needs to have onsite access to a nurse, a psychologist (and/or counsellor) and a social worker. Big schools would need more than one psychologist or counsellor. I would also suggest that every school would have access to therapies such as Occupational Therapy, Speech and Language Therapy, Dieticians, Play Therapy, and so on. I don’t believe it is realistic to expect one of each of these in each school so I would expand the role of the Special Needs Assistant to include basic therapeutic intervention.
To me, the above alone, would fix a huge number of issues with special education.
I think we also have to have a look at special classes and whether they are a positive solution in schools. Research on special classes suggests they may not be. What about the role of special schools, and what do we need to ensure they are supported properly? I would support a full inclusion model but it would need to be properly resourced because if it isn’t, it will fail.
In my podcast, I said that Special Education will be the scandal of the 21st Century in Ireland and we will talk about it in the same breath as the sexual abuse and physical abuse crimes of the Catholic Church in the 20th century. We need to fix special education now.
Funding
One of the most curious pieces of funding every Budget Day in Ireland is the grant that is given to horse-racing and greyhound-racing. This year it is €99.1m. The justification for this is that without this grant, the greyhound industry would collapse and it needs to be propped up. Whatever your opinion on greyhound racing, my point is that when it comes to other sectors in Ireland, the funding that is given, is supposed to ensure that the sector can function. When it comes to education, it seems to be an exception.
While one might argue they haven’t heard of a school going bankrupt, this is generally because of the goodwill of parents propping up the education system through fees, fundraising, volunteering and donations. There are very few primary schools in Ireland that are properly resourced.
Most primary schools have to make a choice between hiring a cleaner and a caretaker because they can’t afford both, and whatever one they choose, most schools can only afford one on a part-time basis, even big schools. Smaller schools haven’t a hope.
Most primary schools have to hope that the weather remains warm enough so they don’t have to switch on the heating. And even when they do, they often can only heat the building for a very short time and ask the children and staff to wear extra layers.
Most primary schools have to wait until their essential services such as boilers and alarms fully break down because they don’t get enough funding to keep them maintained. When they fully break down, they can apply for emergency funding but there is no guarantee of that until they have to threaten to close the school.
There is a famous saying that teaching is the only profession in the world where you steal from your home for your work. Most teachers are working from laptops that are either their own, or are several years out of date. Teachers have to buy basic resources like whiteboard markers, etc. because schools don’t have the budget to pay for them. I have heard of some teachers that buy food and clothes for children in their class from their own pockets.
To me, the funding model is primarily linked to the patronage model, where the Department of Education provides FOR education. If we took out that word, FOR, we would see a system where the State would be responsible for funding everything a school needed, whether that’s utility bills, transport for swimming, insurance, school lunches, caretakers, and so on. Interestingly, there are nine primary schools in Ireland that have this model — they are called The Model Schools. Their “patron” is the Minister for Education and they are a good model to show how the system could work in terms of funding.
However, for now, if we are going to have to get funding from the Department of Education, essentially it’s pretty simple: treat us like greyhounds.
