Quinn urges debate on CAO points [IrishTimes]
- Published: 07 September 2011
Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn says he has an "open mind '' about changes to the CAO points system for college admission.
Speaking a today's unveiling of a new report on college entry, the Minister called for a public debate on the transition by students from Leaving Cert to third level.
The new report, from former UCD vice president Prof Áine Hyland, backs a radical transformation of the points system. Prof Hyland's paper lists a range of possible new options. These include a lottery for all third level courses.
She also proposes a new, more targeted system that would seek to build a stronger link between the students' skill sets and their college option.
Prof Hyland said she favoured this "weighted lottery '' system whereby, for example, students with strong science grades in the Leaving Cert would gain preferential access to science courses at third level.
Full Story: www.irishtimes.com
Dáil protest planned over special needs cuts [IrishTimes]
- Published: 07 September 2011
PARENTS, TEACHERS and advocacy groups will protest outside Leinster House when the Dáil returns next week over plans to reduce the number of special needs assistants in schools.
A group calling itself the Alliance Against Cuts in Education said children with special needs, as well as those without, would suffer from such cuts.
Chairman of the group Tomás Ó Dúlaing, who is principal of Griffeen Valley Educate Together National School in Lucan, Co Dublin, said they were “the cruellest and most inhuman cutbacks” he had witnessed in his 31 years of teaching. Mr Ó Dúlaing said children with special needs returning to primary and secondary schools last week had been greeted with “a devastating array of cutbacks that, collectively, constitute a hammer-blow to their potential development”.
Full Story: www.irishtimes.com
Breaking point: Mother battles to get help for son [IrishExaminer]
- Published: 07 September 2011
JACK McNIFFE is a unique child.
The 6-year-old from Kildare has the rare, degenerative Cinca syndrome, and is the only known child in the world to have both that and Down Syndrome.
But in another way, he’s not unique at all.
Jack started school last week and despite requiring a full-time special needs assistant (SNA), he instead receives just one hour of SNA a day, which he shares with seven other special needs children who also began school in his class at St Raphael’s special school in Celbridge, Co Kildare.
Now the fear is that further cutbacks in SNAs will exacerbate the problems already being experienced by parents like Jack’s mother, Aisling. "It is a pretty devastating illness, there is no cure, you can only manage it — and we are only barely managing it," she says of Jack’s health condition, the full name of which is chronic infantile neurologic cutaneous and articular syndrome.
Full Story: www.examiner.ie
Parents too tired to read bedtime story to children [IrishExaminer]
- Published: 07 September 2011
WITH teenage literacy levels falling, a survey has found that fewer than one third of Irish children have a story read to them at bedtime.
The survey of more than 300 parents looked at the importance of reading with children, to build an interest in reading and writing.
The research found that 60% of parents said longer working hours had left them too tired, with almost half agreeing there is too much to do at home to spend time reading with their child.
Just over 60% said bedtime is stressful but a routine incorporating reading would ease a child to sleep.
The survey was carried out by Direction Research for Nestle Munch Bunch.
Full Story: www.examiner.ie
March on Leinster House over SNA cuts [IrishExaminer]
- Published: 07 September 2011
TEACHERS, parents and resource assistants will march on Leinster House next week to demonstrate against "inhumane" education cuts affecting children with special needs.
The Alliance Against Cuts in Education (ACE) group has appealed for people from around the country to attend the demonstration, declaring that there were moral, ethical, social and financial imperatives for doing so.
The group, chaired by the principal of Griffeen Valley Educate Together School in Lucan, Co Dublin, Tomás O’Dulaing, described themselves as a "loose umbrella group" whose aim was to campaign against "the immorality of what this government is doing".
Full Story: www.examiner.ie
