TUI:DELEGATES AT the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) conference yesterday unanimously backed a proposal that State funding should be withdrawn from schools which operate enrolment policies designed to exclude students with special educational needs.
The motion from the union’s executive committee was proposed by TUI assistant general secretary John MacGabhann.
He argued that the money which is withdrawn from such schools should be used to roll back cuts in funding in areas such as schoolbook aid.
Mr MacGabhann said it was “shameful and irresponsible of the Department of Education and Science not to acknowledge that in towns and cities around the country, a significant number of schools operate exclusionary practices”.
He said such practices were designed to keep out “students with special educational needs, Traveller students, international students for whom English is not the mother tongue, students with emotional and behavioural difficulties, and students with limited academic capacity”.
“These practices are a shameful exercise in social engineering engaged in by boards of management which will loudly claim to champion and teach social justice, while perpetuating social injustice and an Irish version of apartheid.”
Mr MacGabhann said that offending schools clearly did not promote Government policy on equity and integration, yet they were in receipt of Government funding.
He said such schools believed they could continue to exclude significant disadvantaged pupil groups with impunity.
The department, he added, continued to blind itself to enrolment patterns and, with the National Educational Welfare Board and the National Council for Special Education, refused to discuss the issue or make available hard information to allow for informed debate.
“The TUI has for four years been demanding information regarding enrolment patterns on a school-by-school basis – specifically in relation to pupils with special educational needs.
“The claim of the agencies – ludicrously – is that the figures are not available,” he said.
While the boards of management were the primary culprits behind this educational apartheid, they could not act without the collusion of the department and the inspectorate, who are wedded, it would seem, “to Victorian notions of excellence based on social stratification”.
Mr MacGabhann said it was wrong that schools which practised this educational apartheid should get the same grants, capitation payments and teachers’ salaries for “serving a privileged, homogenous pupil cohort as do schools that honourably serve all the children of the nation”.
He said the TUI would be accused of being “levellers who, out of envy of our betters”, were seeking to bring all down to the level of the lowest common denominator, but nothing could be further from the truth.
The union wanted nothing other than high-quality public education for all.
Mr MacGabhann said the TUI campaign was sometimes misrepresented as one of opposition to fee-paying schools, which by definition were exclusionary.
Yet the problem affected practically every town or suburb with more than one post-primary school, where typically one school would be seen and used by the others as a holding camp for those they regard as socially unsuitable.
“We have a simple belief. It is that every child is entitled to be educated in her or his local school in the company of her or his siblings, friends and neighbours.
“Is it too much to ask of our Ministers, TDs, local councillors, boards of management and others in positions of power and influence that they espouse and pursue to completion this simple ideal – that they cherish all the children of the nation equally?”
The TUI represents over 12,000 teachers and lecturers in post-primary, higher and further education.
