Protestant fee-charging secondary schools have warned the Department of Education that the future of many schools is at risk due to the sector being “frozen out” of a growing number of State grants.
There are 18 Protestant or minority faith private schools at second level, many of which are smaller and based in regional areas, which opted not to enter the free education scheme when it was established in the late 1960s.
In correspondence seen by The Irish Times, the Irish School Heads’ Association – which represents Protestant second-level schools – says the department’s policy of excluding fee-charging schools from key sources of public funding is putting many under funding pressure and undermining State commitments to ensure equality of provision for all.
Over the past 15 years, the association says parents who decided to educate their children in the faith of their families have “borne the brunt” of successive cuts to ancillary grants, pupil-teacher ratios and career guidance allocation.
“Many if not most of our parents make enormous sacrifices to send their families to our schools and many receive various forms of assistance in doing so,” a letter from the association to Minister for Education Norma Foley states.
“With this in mind, their being frozen out of the schoolbooks scheme is another blow to their efforts to send their children to minority faith schools and puts this participation and the future of many of our schools and communities at risk.”
The association argues that there are limited educational options for Protestant parents who opt to educate their children in their faith and, as a result, end up making financial sacrifices for travel and boarding.
“This is a key point of difference: for most parents in Ireland there has always existed choice with regard to the majority Catholic ethos or multidenominational or non-denominational schools. For Protestant families, that breadth of choice in their locality has not been available.”
[ Fees have jumped across many of Ireland’s private secondary schools. Why?Opens in new window ]
The department says its policy of providing a lower level of funding for fee-charging schools recognises their capacity to raise funds through mandatory fees, while also in receipt of exchequer funding.
It has also pointed out that it operates a “Protestant block grant” scheme, or means-tested student support, that enables students to attend a school whose ethos accords with their faith tradition.
This scheme aims to ensure that Protestant children who satisfy a means test can attend a school of their choice and can be used by the student to help pay boarding costs or tuition fees where the recipient attends a fee-charging school.
Last November, however, the association told the Minister that “long-established practices of equality and inclusion have either been forgotten, put aside deliberately and consciously changed [without consultation]”.
It also accused the department of “poor understanding of the situation we face on behalf of many minority faith families, whom the State has given a firm commitment to support in the past and is now gradually eroding that support on many levels”.
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