O'Keeffe rounds on teachers in book-grant row
Batt O'Keeffe: grant withdrawn
Education Minister Batt O'Keeffe last night hit back at criticism from a teachers' union over the withdrawal of the school books grant from needy families.
The minister has accused the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) of "selective remarks that conveniently ignore" increases in other funding for schools.
From this September, the book grants will be available only to pupils in designated disadvantaged schools -- about 500 of the 4,000 primary and post-primary schools.
Children from low-income families in other schools will lose the grant -- in order to save €7.5m .
When the books grant was cut, the minister also announced an increase in the funding for schools to meet other costs, such as day-to-day bills.
Rounding on the TUI yesterday, the minister said the union would be "better telling parents the full story instead of selectively cherry-picking aspects of policy changes".
But TUI general secretary Peter McMenamin said the increases in the other grants did not compensate for the cuts in the books grant.
"This cut was introduced in order to save money," he said
The Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) said it was indefensible of the minister to suggest that schools could opt out of paying heating and insurance in order to provide books.
Burden
The Society of St Vincent de Paul has also hit out at the frequency with which school books are "revised and updated", putting an extra and unnecessary financial burden on parents.
Society president Mairead Bushnell said it was particularly frustrating for families where an older child may have used an earlier version of the textbook but where the teacher insisted that the revised version must now be used, which in many cases did not differ substantially from the earlier versions.
In a letter to the teacher unions, she sought support in discouraging the practice by recommending that teachers continue to use existing textbooks and to use alternatives to workbooks that may be used in association with a textbook.
The society says that the removal of the book grants scheme from schools that are not designated disadvantaged would compound the strain felt by parents at this time of year.
National Parents Council-Primary chief executive Aine Lynch said the issue of books being updated on a regular basis, sometimes only involving minimal change, was a trap into which schools and parents were falling.
Ms Lynch said Ireland was one of the few European countries where books were not provided for children in school "and that is something we need to question".
Meanwhile, schoolbags should not be more than 15pc of a child's bodyweight, parents have been warned.
It means that an average nine-year-old, weighing 34 kilos, should be carrying a bag of no more than 5.1 kilos.
Heavy schoolbags become a bigger problem when children move into second level because of the number of new subjects pupils take on.
- Katherine Donnelly
