State funding from exclusionary schools’ – TUI
(16 Apr 2009)
The Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) today suggested that schools which operate exclusionary enrollment policies should be penalised by way of removal their State funding .
The union believes that money withdrawn should be targeted towards rolling back of some of the most brutal education cuts, such as the withdrawal of school book aid.
Speaking today, TUI Assistant General Secretary John MacGabhann said:
“It is shameful and irresponsible of the Department of Education and Science (DES) not to acknowledge that in towns and cities around the country a significant number of schools operate exclusionary practices that are designed to keep students with special educational needs, Traveller students, international students for whom English isn’t the mother tongue, students with emotional and behavioural difficulties and students with limited academic capacity or motivation outside the gate.
These practices are a shameful exercise in social engineering engaged in by boards of management which will loudly claim to champion and teach social justice while perpetuating social injustice and an Irish version of apartheid.
These schools are in receipt of government funding and are meant to promote governmental educational policy on equity and integration. It is clear that they don’t. These schools believe that they can continue to exclude significant disadvantaged pupil groups with impunity. Why is that? It is because the DES blinds itself to the truth of enrolment patterns, because - all politics being local - politicians of all shades and hues won’t dare upset local social snobberies, won’t assert the rights of the disenfranchised. Indeed the politicians often serve on the boards of management of schools that treat the excluded – parents and children – with contempt.
It is because the DES, the National Educational Welfare Board and the National Council for Special Education refuse to open discussion on the real issues, deny us access to the hard information that would inform public discourse. TUI has for four years been demanding information regarding enrolment patterns on a school by school basis – specifically in relation to pupils with special educational needs. The claim of the agencies – ludicrously – is that the figures are not available. Not even the most gullible and innocent believes this story. There can be no doubt - whatever the excuses – that they are engaged in a cover-up.
What has been the response of the DES and its agencies to this scandal? At its strongest it was a feeble mix of whining and hypocrisy. The DES conducted a partial audit of schools’ enrolment policies. It inexplicably took more than two years to complete, during which time the concentrations of students from marginalised groups grew apace in the schools that apply government policy.
Because it is always the case that if one or more schools in a community exclude categories of students, another school ends up with a concentration of the excluded.
Who is complicit in the educational apartheid that characterizes the Irish second-level system? Boards of Management are clearly the primary culprits. However, they could not act as they do without the collusion of the DES and, particularly, the inspectorate who are wedded, it would seem, to Victorian notions of excellence based on social stratification notwithstanding hollow incantation of pieties about equity. Government also colludes as is evidenced by the fact that absolutely no penalty applies to the agents and practitioners of apartheid. They get the same grants, capitation payments and teachers’ salaries for serving a privileged, homogenous pupil cohort as do schools that honourably serve all the children of the nation. TUI has called for progressive reduction of the payments to exclusionary schools. We do so again, and suggest that rather than going to the general Exchequer coffers, this money be targeted towards rolling back some of the most brutal education cuts, such as the removal of school book aid.
Now more than ever it is critical that this issue be aggressively addressed. Otherwise an underclass of schools will emerge that will not be able to attract students from their traditional cohort, that will become – de facto – special schools, catering only to the disadvantaged and marginalized.
We will face the accusation that we are levellers, who - out of envy of our betters - are seeking to or at least are willing to bring all down to the level of the lowest common denominator, that we are hostile to concepts and standards of academic excellence. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is precisely because we demand high quality public education for all and access to the highest standards for all that we pursue our policy and make our demands. If this discommodes the pillars of the gated communities, so be it.
Our campaign is sometimes misrepresented as being one merely of opposition to fee-paying schools. Such schools are of course exclusionary by definition – initially and at the least on the basis of ability of parents to pay.. They are not an option for most parents and, with the exception of south County Dublin where they abound, cannot be said to purport to cater for the local community of school-goers. The most significant problem is one that affects practically every town or suburb with more than one post-primary school. Typically, one school will be regarded and used by the others as a compound, a holding camp for those they regard as socially unsuitable and unworthy of admission to their hallowed halls.
We have a simple belief. It is that every child is entitled to be educated in her/his local school in the company of her/his siblings, friends and neighbours. Is it too much to ask of our ministers, TDs, local councillors, boards of management and of others in positions of power and influence that they espouse and pursue to completion this simple ideal, that they cherish all the children of the nation equally.”