Anger at cut in language teachers
A DISADVANTAGED school with more than 100 foreign students has had its language support teachers halved because of Government cutbacks.
The secondary school in Coolcotts in Wexford is just one example of schools in the DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) scheme affected by cost savings in education.
Yesterday, the president of the Irish Primary Principals Network, Pat Goff, who is also principal of the 530-pupil school at Coolcotts, said that although DEIS schools were spared the worsening of the teacher ratio and the withdrawal of the book grant, they didn't escape the axe altogether.
"We have pupils from 27 nationalities in our school -- 100 from overseas, but we have lost two of the four language support teachers we had last year."
He said the four were providing an invaluable service helping pupils from overseas to integrate, but now the expertise of two of them was being lost to the system.
Last year the school had 30 special needs assistants and lost three before the summer holidays. A review of the provision of these assistants in the school is due in a few weeks and the fear is that it will lose some more. He said the school was suffering as well because of the moratorium on filling vacant middle-management positions in schools.
The moratorium is also causing serious problems for sectors dealing with disadvantaged students in the VEC sector, the Irish Vocational Education Association said last night.
General secretary Michael Moriarty described it as blatantly discriminatory as the axe had fallen on adult education officer and education officer posts. In Co Mayo VEC, for instance, both adult education officer posts were vacant, as well as the critical post of education officer.
"In this VEC therefore the educational infrastructure has been practically dismantled... This is both unfair and unsustainable."
He said that the adult education service was expected to function, where vacancies arose, without the leadership of the adult education organiser.
Meanwhile, the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) has called for an assurance that education will be insulated from further cutbacks in the coming months. General Secretary Peter MacMenamin said they would continue "to appeal vigorously" for a rolling back of some of the most savage cutbacks.
- John Walshe and Katherine Donnelly
