proposed closure of smaller schools- why?

[greengreen]

The recent budget has resulted in the chance that some smaller schools will close and others will lose teachers. If small schools are to close , has anyone costed this? There are about 30 1 teacher schools in the whole country. 2/3 are minority religions so they won't be effected. 8/9 are on islands so they won't close. Therefore all this cut will result in is the closure of about 18 schools. The teachers will be redeployed so no real saving there. The schools that the students will go to will have to make room so a potential cost there and maybe a new teacher depending on numbers . One of the highest costs will be from the cost of transport which will be ongoing. Seems a little shortsighted but maybe there is more to it.

[Clanrickard]

The sooner the better in my book.Bigger schools with better facilities and one teacher per class. Small rural schools are parish pumpery at its worst.

[deiseguy]

The sooner the better in my book.Bigger schools with better facilities and one teacher per class. Small rural schools are parish pumpery at its worst.

My kids attend a relatively small school. 6 teachers arond 150 pupils. Some of the teachers have been teaching there since I attended the school and so there is huge continuity. Every teacher knows every child and therefore problems in the playground or elsewhere are picked up v.quickly. My nephew attends a large urban school there are over 90 children in his class/year alone obviously spread out overa number of classes. I shudder to think of my own children going to such a place. Each pupil is hardly a cypher to the teachers, there appears to be little personal interaction between parents and teachers. The school my children attend appears to be comparable on an equipment and facilities level to their cousins school although we have to do quite a bit of fundraising as parents to provide these facilities. This has always been done in this school and if parents want the smaller schools they should be prepared to help bridge the funding problems caused by lack of scale in these schools. My view may be parish-pumpery but I can live with that particular barb in this case.

p.s. Any principal of one of those "rat infested" schools should be immeadiately sacked for gross dereliction of duty. Rentokil/rat poison are not that expensive. These rat infestations are usually nothing more than a stick to beat politicians with and not one of them will ever have the courage to call the board of management of said school on their non-performamce in this regard.

As you can see I am fully in favour of the huge structural reforms needed accross the public service just NIMBY.

[Feelinglost]

The sooner the better in my book.Bigger schools with better facilities and one teacher per class. Small rural schools are parish pumpery at its worst.

A brave new world of schooling awaits us.

[etak0723]

Hollymount national school, co kerry 16 children, 3 members of staff appointing a principal =madness

[bluefirelog]

Hollymount national school, co kerry 16 children, 3 members of staff appointing a principal =madness

Is that true? It is hard to believe and does sound completely excessive...

[Schuhart]

My nephew attends a large urban school there are over 90 children in his class/year alone obviously spread out overa number of classes. I shudder to think of my own children going to such a place. Each pupil is hardly a cypher to the teachers, there appears to be little personal interaction between parents and teachers.

I'm not particularly commenting on the small school issue; just on the idea that larger schools are to be feared. That's not my experience. I find teachers these days to be very professional; I'm impressed at how, despite much larger class sizes than would pertain in smaller schools, they actually do have an alert assessment of their pupils progress. We don't know every teacher in the school - just the ones that have taught our children. Nor do I see a need to know them, if they weren't teaching one of ours.

All they produce out of that school, which typically has three classes in each year, are hordes of well-adjusted, confident happy children - well prepared to take on secondary school. The school has coped with rapid social change - one of our children is in a class where one third of the pupils would not be Irish natives - and I'm glad our children are a part of it.

Again, I'm staying out of the small school issue per se in this thread. I just think images of larger schools as inhuman places needs to be challenged with a more balanced view. If they were truly so awful, we just wouldn't use them.

[locke]

TBH It's undesirable to have a teacher responsible for more than one class, so that would suggest a size of over 200. Obviously, islands are a special case as the disadvantage of either forcing a daily sea journey (likely to be often cancelled) or boarding school on young children outweighs the benefits.

I'd make 2 observations about the general principle
- Our rural school network was established when kids had to walk to school every day. That's just not the case any more, so there don't have to be as many schools as there are
- This process was started once before, although as far as I can tell it was never put in place anywhere other than Wexford. But that means we can look at what happened there to learn what does and doesn't work rather than just starting from scratch.

[oceanfreer]

Hollymount national school, co kerry 16 children, 3 members of staff appointing a principal =madness

my friend teaches there and it has only has 2 teachers

[Aindriu]

Small schools are grossly inefficient in terms of their running costs etc. They just do not make any economic sense.