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I sat down over the weekend with Máire, a recently retired primary school principal, to talk about cutbacks in education and what, specifically, it will mean for the classroom. Máire has over 35 years experience working in a DEIS designated primary school on the north side of Dublin. An assured speaker, she has the easy manner of someone who, having worked so long in a classroom, could never be taken aback by any question. Reductions in the number of teachers, achieved though a hiring a hiring freeze and natural turnover, will have an obvious effect on the quality of teaching, but many of the cuts have effects which are not as easy to spot unless you are in the classroom; once prompted, Máire quickly reels off these cuts: special needs assistants, necessitous pupil’s grants and language support.
What is worst about the cuts is that they completely undermine the effectiveness of teachers in the classroom. The job of special needs assistants (SNAs) is to take children with severe learning, physical or behavioral difficulties and provide support inside and outside the class, and, if necessary, removing children ‘identified as being a risk to themselves and others’ so that they can b placed in a suitable environment can be put in an environment. “Now, with cuts”, says Máire, “these kids now going back into classrooms”. It is easy to suppose that, since my child has no learning difficulty, cuts in SNAs will have no affect, but that is just wishful thinking.
The ‘necessitous pupil’s grant’ to DEIS schools allowed schools to provide textbooks for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Acknowledging that it is an imperfect system (critics complain that it is the parents’ responsibility to buy these items), Máire maintains that “after the first week of September, it doesn’t matter who is to blame – everyone suffers if one child is in a position where it is impossible to learn”. Since money simply has to be found to ensure every child has books, it means the money raised from fundraising will be spread even thinner.
Again, it is support staff that bare the brunt of cuts as language support numbers are reduced – this is an area which very much depends on where you’re based, but with a quarter of schools in Ireland having between 10% and 70% of foreign-born students, these cuts mean that it is the normal pupil who will suffer from a more disruptive class and overworked teachers unable to give to find enough time in the day to give each pupil the attention they deserve.
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