IPPN

Published: 21 December 2011

Budget Cuts – Updates from our meeting on Friday
At a briefing session given to the education partners by DES officials on Friday, December 16th, it was stated that a comprehensive circular on all aspects of the budget measures will be issued to schools in January 2012.

The circular due into schools in January 2012 will contain the following appendices:

• staffing schedule for all schools
• the GAM allocation for every named primary school
• a list of the names of the 1,600 base schools for low incidence permanent resource posts
• a list of permanent language posts allocated to schools.

Every school will be written to individually by late January.

The following issues were clarified with the following information:

1. Small Schools
• No small schools will be closed by the DES as a result of the changes announced. If they amalgamate it will be their decision alone. The DES states that these phased changes are intended to distribute the available resources more evenly and fairly across the system. The pupil teacher ratio is lower in small schools than in DEIS Band 1 schools, which is now at 22:1.  The Value for Money review of small schools has yet to report to the Minister, but is expected later in this school year.

2. General Allocation Model (GAM)
• The new GAM will begin from September 2012 with the aim of simplifying the process and giving certainty on staffing much earlier to schools. (Current GAM is based on 2003 enrolments).
• The GAM for every school will be published in the circular in January 2012.
• It will be linked to the number of classroom teachers in the previous school year and will be updated annually.
• GAM will cater for Learning Support, Language Support and High Incidence SEN
• Mixed or all-boys’ schools will get an allocation of 5 hours per week (or 0.2 of a post) for each classroom teaching post. A school is designated a ‘Mixed School’ if it has 30% boys enrolled. All-girls’ schools will get an allocation of 4 hours per week [or 0.16 of a post] for each classroom teaching post.
• The GAM allocation for a particular year will be known after 30th September of the previous year and so will enable recruitment and redeployment to go ahead earlier than has been the case.
• Including EAL in GAM is designed to give permanent status to Language Support
• The DES states that re-clustering of GAM hours into fulltime posts will be operated at school level giving greater autonomy to schools. The original clustering was designed by the Inspectorate and DES back in 2005.
• DEIS Band 1 schools will receive a small top-up to offset their losses under GAM this year – the size of this top-up not yet agreed but will be in the new circular.

3. Low Incidence Provision
• 1,600 schools, based on their current resource allocation, will be selected by the DES as base schools for 2,450 full-time permanent resource posts. (80% of all resource posts). A table of the number of posts is contained in previous briefing documents.
• The names of the 1,600 base schools will be published in the circular in January.
• A balance of 20% will go to top up the needs of schools to cater for children new to the system or newly diagnosed. These will be temporary posts.
• The resource hours sanctioned for each school will be published on the NCSE website. That information, together with the list of 1,600 base schools, will inform principals about the local schools with which they might form a cluster. 
• The SENO will have an oversight role in relation to the sharing arrangements between schools.
• Existing clusters may continue, or may be broken, depending on the needs of the schools for 2012-2013. Schools will have autonomy in these decisions.
• Schools will not be permitted to combine GAM and NCSE approved resource hours. The reason given by the DES for this decision is that the GAM allocation for each school will be known earlier in the year and will enable the employment process, including redeployment panels, to happen earlier than in recent years. Decisions about low incidence resource hours are made typically from June to August, or later. If they are combined with the GAM allocation they will always delay the recruitment process. If they are separate the recruitment of permanent posts can take place much earlier in the year.
IPPN made the strong views of principals known to the DES, saying that the combination of GAM and Low Incidence hours should continue where a school had enough hours for a full-time post.

4. DEIS Band 1 Schools
The following are the staffing arrangements in DEIS Band 1 schools as outlined at Friday’s meeting.

In total there are 199 DEIS Band 1 schools, of these 32 were in the former Breaking the Cycle (BTC) programme that predated DEIS.

Breaking The Cycle - 32 schools in total
• DEIS Band 1 BTC Junior Schools will operate a staffing schedule of 18:1
• DEIS Band 1 BTC Senior Schools will operate a staffing schedule of 24:1
• Vertical (junior and senior pupils) Band 1 BTC schools will operate separate staffing schedules of 18:1 at junior and 24:1 at senior level.

All Other DEIS Band 1 Schools (167 schools that are not in Breaking the Cycle)
• DEIS Band 1 Junior Schools will operate a staffing schedule of 20:1
• DEIS Band 1 Senior schools will operate a staffing schedule of 24:1 
• DEIS Band 1 Vertical (junior and senior pupils) schools will operate a staffing schedule of 22:1.

Schools will be notified in January of their staffing arrangements for the 2012/13 school year.  This will include any alleviation measures for those schools considered to be most acutely affected by these changes. 

5. Appointment of Administrative Principals
• The pupil enrolment figure for the appointment of an Administrative Principal is 178 pupils (DEIS Band: 133)
• A relatively small number of schools also qualify for Administrative Principal status on the basis of the number of teachers in their school. This means that these schools do not have certainty in relation to Administrative Principal status until the teacher allocations process is fully completed. This will now be changed so that the qualification criteria for Administrative Principal for all schools will be based on reaching the relevant pupil thresholds.  This will give much earlier certainty for schools once their enrolment numbers are known.  A similar approach will also apply to the criteria for allocating the small number of Administrative Deputy Principals at primary level
• The pupil enrolment threshold for the appointment of administrative principals in schools with autism units will be published in the circular
• As a means to ease the transition to the entirely enrolment-driven arrangements for Administrative Principals and Administrative Deputy Principals, schools that are adversely affected by the rule change can continue to keep their Administrative Principal or Administrative Deputy Principal status until there is a change of Principal or Deputy Principal in the school.

6. Modern Languages Project
This project will continue up to the end of this school year and will not continue in September 2012.

Research Request
Avril Carey, Principal, Beaumont Hospital School is undertaking research on ‘School Re-entry for students following Traumatic Brain Injury - The Professional Development Needs of Teachers in Ireland’. If you would like to assist Avril with her research, click here to access the questionnaire.

Is sinne le meas

Seán Cottrell & Gerry Murphy