IPPN

Published: 11 March 2009

Source: Irish Independent

By John Walshe Education Editor


Wednesday March 11 2009

THE taxpayer has paid out €420m to subsidise fee-paying secondary schools over the past few years, new figures reveal.

The disclosure is likely to prompt fresh calls for a review of funding for the sector.

A breakdown shows the money was spent as follows:


Teachers' salaries -- €367m;
Grant payments -- €33m;
Building expenditure -- €12m;
Supervision payments --€5m.

Although the amount spent on salaries was generally known, the State expenditure on buildings had not been revealed until now.

Catholic fee-paying schools received €5m, while Protestant schools got the remainder. The highest year was in 2006, when €2.6m was spent on Catholic schools and €3.2m on the remainder, according to figures given in a Dail reply to Labour's Mary Upton.

Catholic fee-paying schools receive capital funding at the rate of 50pc of the total cost, subject to the individual circumstances of each case.

But Protestant and Jewish schools qualify for capital grant aid on the same basis as secondary schools in the free education scheme. Schools make a contribution of 5pc of the cost of a new building, with a cap on the local contribution of €63,000, and 10pc for an extension or refurbishment, with a cap on their contribution of €31,500.

Until this year, Protestant fee-charging schools were also paid a range of support service grants that the Catholic schools did not receive. These grants are being withdrawn in 2009 at a saving of €2.8m.

However, the withdrawal of the grants has upset the Protestant community.

Resentment

A letter sent by the Church of Ireland bishops to the minister says that "it is a cause of great resentment on the part of many in our community that there has now been a realignment of the Protestant Voluntary Schools, without notice or consultation".

The letter, seen by the Irish Independent, criticises the "blunt and drastic out-working of this unilateral realignment".

It says that in vast tracts of the Republic -- the west of Ireland, the south-west, north and east Cork, the south-east, west Dublin, the midlands, north-east and much of the north-west -- the State is not, itself, providing free Protestant secondary schools. A state grant to help pay for the education of necessitous Protestants goes some way towards filling a gap created by the State's own inability to provide free schools in every place.

But those who do not meet the rigorous means-tested criteria, and those who want their child to attend a Protestant school, have no option but to pay for a school of their own religious characteristic spirit and ethos. This contrasts with the majority of Irish secondary school pupils who are not obliged to pay for this, it says.

"It is a matter of the utmost concern to us, as bishops of the Church of Ireland, that this unique minority situation be acknowledged and, moreover, that the established place of all our Protestant schools within the free education scheme be endorsed afresh by you and your department" says the letter.

- John Walshe Education Editor