The Education Minister has (again) expressed her appreciation for the importance of offering a diverse choice in education. She has (again) engaged with stakeholders, namely bishops to demonstrate her commitment to this. She is also going to survey parents (again) to ascertain what they would like.
The process of making Irish schools more diverse has been going on since 2011 when the Pluralism and Patronage Forum was set up. It has failed to garner anywhere close to real results. The crux of the matter, to me, is that we’re treating schools like commodities rather than public services. We’re also asking the wrong questions.
It’s fairly well-known that if you by a pre-made sandwich in Tesco or Dunnes or Marks and Spencers in Ireland, the sandwich you buy is made in the same factory. The only thing that’s different is the packaging and labelling. It’s the same ingredients. When somebody buys an “Always Delicious Roast Chicken and Stuffing on Soft Malted Brown Bread” sandwich or Tesco’s “Chicken and Stuffing on Malted Bread” sandwich, whatever one you choose is the same sandwich but because the former is packaged with a more premium look, with better descriptions and nicer pictures, one generally believes they’ve eaten a much nicer sandwich.
Schools are more or less the same. We all teach the same core curriculum, we have the same types of teachers, and we have the same diversity of children, in general. The only difference between the schools is who runs the schools. It’s the extra ingredient.
In some cases, the added ingredient is nuanced. An Educate Together school and Community National School basically have the same ingredients but with different packaging. Let’s throw in the Catholic School and let’s say it simply added a small amount of bacon for flavour. The Church of Ireland school might add a thin slice of ham instead. Now let’s serve these sandwiches to a Jewish person.
As you can imagine, it puts him/her into a very difficult situation. 95% of the sandwich is fine but that 5% of pork makes it very difficult for them to eat it. They can try and eat around the pork but as it is impossible for it not to permeate throughout the sandwich, it’s very difficult.
If this sandwich was the only food the Jew could eat, the truth is, they’d eat it, and they’d probably enjoy it while feeling guilty or a bit sick. It’s kind of like how I felt when I blessed myself for the first time when teaching a class in my first job. I loved teaching but every time I said a prayer or taught a religion lesson, I didn’t feel right. As a parent sending your kid into the only school in the area to sit at the back of the school, 95% happy is going to have to do. Most parents have to simply suck it up or starve.
Some might say that this is a good argument for creating lots of different flavours of sandwich so everyone gets a flavour that they like. Or perhaps, we should have several variations of the chicken and stuffing sandwich:
- Chicken and Stuffing with no pork
- Vegan Chicken with Stuffing
- Sandwich on white bread rather than brown bread
- Sandwich without butter
- Sandwich without mayonnaise
- You get the picture!
There are two issues with this.
- Why do schools have to be very different from each other? We don’t ask for different types of garda service, fire stations or hospitals. Why would primary schools be any different?
- We can’t provide a different type of school for every belief system or whim in every part of the country so we need a default type of school where everyone has the equality of respect. In much the same way as somewhere like Dublin can have several supermarket brands, somewhere like Dunlavin in Co. Wicklow won’t have that option.
With this in mind, we need to move away completely from sandwiches and focus on these issues and see how we can have an education system that can resolve them.
On the first point, schools in Ireland are generally only different by the religious order running them – 90% Catholic, 5% Church of Ireland, 3% Multidenominational and a couple of Muslim and Jewish schools. (I’m leaving out Gaelscoileanna as a separate entity for now.) The variable of religion means that if you don’t belong to the religion of your local school, as a parent, you have two choices – drive or get a bus to your nearest school that respects your belief; or attend the school and allow your child to sit at the back of the classroom for a couple of hours a week.
On the second point, travelling to your nearest school that respects your belief isn’t easy. There are still 3 counties in Ireland without a single multidenominational school. More than half of counties have one or less. Therefore, most parents “choose” the second option.
I find it bewildering that most parents seem grateful to their local school for “allowing” them send in separate work for 30 minutes a day rather than their child being part of the school for 100% of the time; but they are grateful. When the child reaches Communion age, I can’t count the number of posts I’ve seen where parents are so happy that their child was allowed to attend the ceremony, wearing special clothes or getting a “job” at the event. You couldn’t imagine it in any other workplace.
The solution is to find a schooling option where everyone can eat. Some might say it would make a very boring sandwich, and maybe that’s where my analogy falls. But schools shouldn’t have fancy packaging; they shouldn’t need to add extra ingredients to compete against other brands; they should simply be the local school where local children go. At the end of the day, schools should be more like the factory supplying children with a equal education no matter where they go.
