Thanks to so many of you who applied to attend the Patronage Forum interim findings presentation today. As you know, because they had so many applicants, they restricted our group to just two places. Slides from the Chair Prof. Coolahan’s powerpoint presentation are available on the DES site www.education.ie. The session was recorded and will be available on the DES website at some stage next week. At the next Portobello ET meeting on Sat 26th (10.30am Donore CC, D8) we will go through the interim findings in more detail but in the meantime here are the main points:
Prof Coolahan opened by saying “the status quo is not an option.” This is good news for Portobello ET parents. He stressed the legal obligation on the State to provide appropriate primary education and the moral obligation on all stakeholders in education to co operate and facilitate efforts to build diversity. About 3,000 of the 3,200 primary schools in the State are managed by the Catholic Church. The Advisory Group is recommending divesting of patronage as part of a rolling plan for incremental change in order to provide an appropriate diversity of primary education. It said that a ‘big bang’ or radical upheaval would not be appropriate. It is recommending that 47 catchment areas (representing 258 schools nationwide in total) identified by the DES should form Phase One of the divesting process. Portobello ET is within one of these catchment areas.
A number of the stakeholders and audience there today made short responses to the interim findings. We stressed the need for urgency for the commencement of phase one, and asked that the final report (due out by the end of the year) will indicate a likely timescale for the process. There is an opportunity for people to make a short submission (1500 words) to the Forum by Dec 1st in response to the interim findings published today. At our next meeting on Sat Nov 26th we can discuss our proposed submission.
There has been an article published in the Irish Times on the meeting.
Henri & Ivana
