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Are the PD’s going to support School vouchers. ?
Read more about: Education
In his speech at the National conferance . Colm O’Gorman said.
We must ensure that real choice exists in primary education, that all families have an opportunity to send their children to the kind of school they wish to attend. In an increasingly multi-cultural Ireland, choice must stop being considered as a middle class luxury. Every family should have access to a Gaelscoil, a multi-denominational, a Catholic or Church of Ireland school if that is their wish.
How would you do this. Would you fund each school with enough money so as to be able to potentialy take every student in the catchment area. Because to truly implement that without having the funding following the students in a kind of school vouchery way would would have to work on the assumption that everyone was going to go to one school and fund each school as if it was that one school. Thus would be spreadinig the education budget over places that are not needed. Otherwise you are guessing the amount of students that would go to the school and might find that more then you guessed would be going to thte Gaelscoil and thus it would be underfunded. You could base it on Last years numbers but as Colm siad.
We must also end the practice of funding schools based upon their last year?s enrolment numbers;
Also school vouchers would be a very PD. Policy. My view here
Also the speech doesn’t say a word about secondary education. The experience of other countries is that on average parents are happy enough with state primary education (which is not to ignore the cases where primary schools are bursting at the seams) but the real crisis begins when the kids hit 12. It’s all the difficulty of the early teenage years and trying to decide what’s the best schooling environment with that going on, and thinking ahead that it’s not that far down the road that they’ll be applying to college. Then the parents feel like they need a school that can tailor more individually to their child and stream him/her correctly. As you said in your earlier post Simon, if everyone has vouchers then the premium schools have to come up with some other way to select and there’s a risk that the system would end up looking similar to now — a few “feeder” schools accounting for a huge proportion of university admissions and a lot of dissatisfied parents. It’s hard to see PDs being up for the kind of interventions necessary to change that system.