IPPN

Published: 21 October 2008

STATEMENT BY PAT RABBITTE TD
Labour Party Spokesperson on Justice

St Mark's Junior and Senior National Schools have over 1,000 pupils in their care in an area not designated disadvantaged. The area concerned is a modest private housing estate of approximately 2,000 houses a very high proportion of which are privately rented. A very large number of these privately rented houses are leased to immigrant families whose children comprise 48% of the Junior School. The junior school for example has 258 children for whom English is not their first guage.
Recently the junior school got sanction for six language support teachers, four of whom will not be re-employed under the Minister's Budget announcement. 258 newcomer children in a school with an enrolment of 536 has placed a huge responsibility on the school ; a challenge which the teachers have taken up with very considerable success and themselves evolved best practice with little help in the matter of guidelines from the Department.

It seems to be unpopular with some outside commentators to highlight that, if schools are inadequately resourced to cope with the language difficulties of newcomer pupils, it will have a seriously adverse impact on indigenous pupils.

Only a year and a half ago St Mark's Junior School won 6 language support teachers i.e. one teacher per 43 pupils with a variety of language needs. The Minister now proposes to cap such resource teachers at two.

To compound the damage the same school now stands to lose €25,333.93 in grants, money that was used to provide books for necessitous pupils, for psychological assessments and so on. This small grant was of immense value. How in the name of heavens does the Minister for Education consider that a school like this can cope with this huge proportion of non-national children and at the same time tend to the needs of its indigenous pupils. Before the very recent arrival of the language support teachers and notwithstanding the diligent efforts of the established teachers, numeracy and literacy levels over ten years suffered badly. Despite the scale and novelty of the challenge nobody from the Minister's department visited the school over 10 years to experience the challenge.

Now as the two schools on the St Mark's campus are about to get on top of the challenge, the government proposes to undermine them. Notwithstanding that the St Mark's Schools are not in an area designated disadvantaged, the proportion accessing third level is improving but not large enough. There are many young people who don't get to third level and some who don't finish second level. For the government to attack primary school children as they have done in the Budget is indefensible and tonight I ask the Minister to withdraw the re-imposition of the ceiling for language support teachers.

For more information contact Deputy Rabbitte at 618 4870
www.labour.ie/press