074. State Money Should Not Be Given To Private Religious Bodies
How does one start an article on such an emotive topic? The best advice is usually to stick to the facts, but as with anything relating to religion, facts are not necessarily the most important thing. However, whatever way one wants to colour it, the Catholic Church stood by idly while hundreds of their clergy […]
070. Make primary education actually free
Primary education is supposed to be free. However, the reality is that it isn’t. In fact, it’s nowhere near free! According to Zurich Insurance who measure this sort of thing, in 2018, it cost an average of €830 per child per year to go to primary school. While some people may not believe this figure, […]
068. Any school with special classes must be given extra administrative support
There are many schools with special classes. Most of them are for children with Autism. These classes come with a large amount of administrative work and usually a principal will delegate this to the Deputy Principal, who, more often than not, will also have full-time teaching duties. My suggestion is that any school with any […]
063. Remuneration for Principals for managing all positions in the school
There’s not too many jobs out there where a manager would work for free. However, that’s exactly what principals do every day. Despite a principal having to manage all the staff in the school, that’s the teachers, SNAs, caretakers, secretaries, bus escorts and anyone else, (s)he only gets paid for the teachers. There are circumstances […]
065. Replace some grants with local companies who compete to get tender
When it comes to some of the bigger grants given to schools for emergency work or summer works schemes, it’s local companies that should be considered to do the jobs. There are some good reasons for this – supporting the local economy and also taking pride in the work. When a school is granted money […]
062. Teachers should no longer be legally able to be fired due to their religious values
Yes, you have read this correctly. In 2019, a teacher can legally be fired due to their religious values. Despite an attempt to remove this right in recent years, it was voted down by the then Fine Gael/Labour government. Whether or not this right has been exercised, is not the point. The fact remains that if […]
061. There should be a Transparent consultation process including a democratic response
Consultations are a fashionable way for governments to pretend they are listening to everyone’s opinions before going ahead with their original plans. The consultation on Pluralism in Education was such an example. The population were given one of 4 options to decide on how best to solve the problem of the so-called Baptism Barrier. Before […]
059. Pay grants based on current Enrollment rather than the previous year
Sometimes it’s little things that produce inequalities in education. One such rule is that schools are given grants based on their enrollments from the previous year. For schools that are developing, this means they receive less than they should for their enrollments. Given that POD exists and all records are digitised, there is really no […]
058. Reduce circulars to maximum 1 per term
It’s rare that a week goes by without a new circular being produced by the Department of Education. There were 85 released in 2018, 83 in 2017, and 84 in 2016 and 2015. This equates to about 2.5 per week. As I’m writing this in early 2019, despite a promise of a slow down from […]
024. Abolish favourable entry to Teacher Training for Protestants
During the recession, it was decided that we had far too many Teacher Training Colleges and it was time to amalgamate them. Hibernia College was exempt as a private entity but the others were all fair game and were absorbed into various universities. One such amalgamation was in DCU where the old St. Patrick’s College […]