Minister Bruton’s religious fixation ‘ignoring’ real education challenges

Ongoing discussions around the so-called ‘baptism barrier’ and the role of religion in schools are distracting from the main challenges facing primary education in Ireland, the head of the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association has said.

Maintaining that “the real issue in Irish education is around a lack of resources”, CPSMA head Seamus Mulconry told The Irish Catholic that although education funding has increased in recent years it has not done so at the level necessary to make real progress, and that Ireland spends just half of what Switzerland does per child.

“My frustration with all of this debate around religion is that it’s ignoring what to me are the three critical issues that are facing education,” he said.

One of these, he said, is “the lack of substitute teachers which means there are thousands of children who do not have a qualified teacher in front of them”, he said, adding that schools are seriously underfunded, with the annual capitation grant being “grossly inadequate to cover running a school”.

“And finally, and in many ways the most significant, the massive administrative overload that is swamping teachers in bureaucracy, in red tape, and in paperwork at a time when they should be focusing on teaching and learning,” he said.

“This is nothing to do with religion, and the admissions bill will not provide a single extra school place,” he said.

Commenting on the minister’s comments in his speech that religion would be used in only the rarest circumstances when considering school admissions and about children from local areas being passed over for admissions by students from outside the area, he said neither of these are problems in Catholic schools.

“The reality is that religion is only used in the rarest of circumstances by Catholic schools in the admissions process,” he said, adding that save in the small number of situations where Catholic children live in parishes without their own schools, “the reality is that Catholic schools in the greater Dublin area use a catchment system already, so they’re not doing that”.

Noting that Mr Bruton seems intent on solving problems that do not exist, Mr Mulconry said: “I’m not sure that he understands how the current system operates.”