Nineteen schools in Kerry were granted €160,000 in funding for STEM projects according to most of the headlines in the media. This was on the back of the controversial decision of the Department of Education using a random number generator to offer out a STEM grant to a small number of the 2,700+ schools that applied for it. The Department of Education didn’t expect to be so inundated with applications, which is a story in itself, but rumours began to arise about preferential treatment, especially that schools in Co. Kerry benefited more than other schools. I decided to find out with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
ChatGPT is great for lots of different things, and one thing I’d heard it was good at was analysing spreadsheets. The Department of Education produced a table of the schools that were awarded the STEM grant, offering the school name and the county as well as how much they were awarded. They also produce a much bigger spreadsheet in their statistics section, which lists every primary school in the country. I have used it in the past for a number of things. My plan was to upload both spreadsheets and see if I could prove any of the rumours out there.
I will admit that I suspected that Co. Kerry would have benefited more than other counties or certainly that the counties represented by senior ministers would have benefited, but on all other counts, I expected that this was yet another mess from the Department of Education, with no real planning or purpose.
I guess the first thing we need to put to bed was whether Norma Foley’s county got more benefit than others.
As you can see, Co. Kerry came somewhere in the middle. Some users on X/Twitter have claimed the the schools that were awarded the grant in Co. Kerry were more likely to be in North Kerry. There are limits to ChatGPT and I didn’t have time to check that out. Someone with access to MyMaps in Google Maps could probably generate a map with the names of the schools.
I was able to generate a map which coloured in the proportion of schools that got the grant, but that didn’t offer a particular pattern. I did have someone call me names on Twitter/X for leaving the six counties in Northern Ireland out of my map despite the fact that the Department of Education doesn’t fund Northern Irish schools. However, he was not to be deterred and I remain an incompetent fool to him. Hopefully you won’t think the same of me.
While I had ChatGPT open, I thought I’d check some other rumours – those heathen schools did better than denominational schools, for example. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing to see here.
As you can see, there was really not much to write home about there. The National Principals’ Forum also released some findings from their survey, which was answered by over 600 principals. They explored whether all-girls’ schools benefitted more than others. However, there was no evidence of this either.
Ultimately, as far as I can see, there wasn’t much to see. My thoughts can be summarised as follows:
With all of that out of the way, my final thoughts:
📌 It looks like the DoE had some money they had to spend due to under-budgeting.
📌 Schools are so badly funded that almost 70% of them applied for a grant so they could buy STEM equipment
📌 The DoE didn’t expect so many applications and decided to divide them up. Although they say they read every application (thanks to @CatrionaGolden on X for sharing this) I don’t believe it. It is impossible to read 2,700 applications in that space of time.
📌 Their process of a lottery does appear to be true. As hard as I tried I haven’t been able to find any evidence of politics going on, (although I’m not in Leitrim!)
📌 However, the biggest takeaway of all is how this process has yet again demonstrated how terrible the systems are for funding schools. Schools shouldn’t be competing with each other for basic STEM equipment. Schools should simply be funded properly.
📌 There will now be a small number of schools who will have good resources for STEM and a very large number that won’t. We are all expected to follow the same curriculum.
📌 There are obviously bigger picture things that are raised by this kind of funding structure and this fiasco plays into this.
📌 The only group that commented on the whole fiasco was The National Principals’ Forum. Neither the INTO or IPPN made a statement at all about it.
