Testing times lie ahead as primary pupil numbers reach 20-year high
August 30, 2012
PRIMARY school pupil numbers are at their highest level in 20 years.
As the back- to- school rush gets under way, the baby boom of the past decade has pushed enrolments up to about 525,000 this September.
This is about 10,000 more than last year – and the number will continue rising until 2019.
Second- level schools are also seeing a surge, with an additional 5,000 pupils bringing enrolments up to about 327,000 this year. A peak in enrolments at post- primary is not expected until about 2027, when it is projected to reach around 400,000.
The explosion in pupil numbers comes as nine new primary and five new post- primary schools open this September.
It also means some good news for newly- qualified primary teachers who are looking for jobs. It is estimated that about 500- 600 such positions need to be filled this year, including up to 400 new posts to cater for the jump in pupil numbers and the replacement of about 200 teachers who retired over the summer.
However, primary teacher graduates – about 1,800 this year – continue to outstrip the number of vacancies available.
Cuts
The news is less promising at post- primary level, though, where cuts of 700 teachers announced in last year’s Budget are affecting job opportunities.
However, there is some relief on the way for the schools worst hit by the embargo on middle management promotions earlier this year.
The Department of Education advised school managers this week that it would now allow a limited number of appointments at assistant principal level. It is a recognition of the loss of staff experienced in some schools in recent months arising from retirements.
In February, a ban was imposed on the payment of allowances associated with positions such as assistant principal and other posts of responsibility.
It is part of the wider ban on the payment allowances to public servants, pending a review aimed at cutting € 75m a year off the € 1.5bn a year bill for such payments. The same ruling has also affected the pay of new teachers, who are now starting on a salary of € 27,814, having lost their qualifications allowance of about € 5,000.
www.independent.ie
Leanann sága an SNM ar aghaidh
August 29, 2012
Cúrsaí Gaeilge an fhómhair le Gaelchultúr i gCeatharlach
August 28, 2012
Cén áit is fearr leat ar domhan?
August 28, 2012
Remembered: my first day at school
August 28, 2012
Starting primary school can be a scary business, which is why that first day can linger in the memory many decades later. Ten very different people look back at their first day in “big school”
RUAIRI QUINN
Minister for Education and Skills
The Minister has strong memories of his first day at St Michael’s in Dublin. “I started ‘big school’ after the Easter holidays of 1952. St Michael’s was a small school in those days, with fewer than 130 pupils. On my first day, my father brought me in at around 11am after the school day had started. We walked through the connecting corridor of rooms in the garden basement of that fine old house that still stands on the corner of Ailesbury Road and Merrion Road. I remember the smell of Jeyes fluid from the brushed timber floors.
“We were greeted by Fr Maguire, the school principal. After a few words, my father left. Fr Maguire tapped on the window of the door of the junior classroom and the teacher welcomed me into a room with about six twin desks. I was given a slate and a piece of chalk and asked to sit beside Tim Crowe. I remember the smell of mala or plasticine and Tim’s friendly greeting and sniffy nose. He remains a friend of mine to this day.”
MARY O’ROURKE
Former tánaiste
“All I can remember of my first day is being terrified, absolutely terrified, and finding it a very alien place,” says the former minister for education, who went to school in Athlone. Part of the terror came from the intimidating Mercy nuns: “They were in full regalia with great long veils and starched wimples and great breastplates of white, starched again. They scared the life out of me.”
But O’Rourke was also scared by the sheer noise of so many children in one place. “We had a big gravel school yard and the din on the first day was terrible. I vividly remember the shouts and roars, and how everyone seemed to have a pal but I didn’t seem to have one.”
She wasn’t used to being left to fend for herself. “I was the youngest [in my family] so I suppose I was a bit petted.” But there was salvation at the end of the day when her mother appeared to take her away on her bicycle. “She had a little seat on the back for me and I can still feel myself holding on to her jacket. There’d be no safety straps. I remember seeing her face looking through the railings. And then I was rescued, and away off with me.”
Mary O’Rourke’s autobiography Just Mary will be published by Gill Macmillan in October
JOHN BUTLER
Writer and director
By the time John Butler started primary school, he’d already survived a first-day trauma when he began Montessori school the previous year. “On that day, mum had wrapped digestive biscuits in cling film and a jam sandwich and I ate it straight after breakfast. I’d have spent all the time with mum up until that point, so eating the food was probably me acting out, trying to rebel.”
There was no secretive biscuit eating when he started primary school. Instead, his new school opened the young Butler’s eyes. “There were so many kids, about 180 in each year. Growing up is about accepting that the scale of things is constantly increasing, and [starting school] is the equivalent of going away to another country and realising the world is a huge place. You realise that these kids, they’ve all got parents, all got families, and you think, wow, we live in a big, big world. I loved it. I didn’t have much trauma about primary – my back was broken by play school. I’d already been taken to a strange building and left there by my mother.” John Butler’s novel The Tenderloin is published by Picador.
JULIE FEENEY
Singer and composer
Julie Feeney has a strong visual memory of her first day in what she describes as “a beautiful country school beside a forest” in Abbeyknockmoy, Co Galway. “I remember sitting in the little red chair, with its red seat and back, and yellow tubes. Tiny little chairs. I remember that very well. And I had an old-fashioned wooden desk. We had a thing called Teach Róisín – a little wooden house in the classroom. You could go into it and there was a little kitchen in it. Maybe three or four children could fit, and it was magical for us.”
She wasn’t scared at all. “My mother was the school principal in the school and I knew she was going to her job. When your parent is the principal it’s very familiar. There wasn’t any fear.”
She was, however, a bit nervous about some of the pupils. “The big girls, the ones in fifth or sixth class, I was a bit scared of them. If I met them now I’d probably still be a little bit afraid of them.”
Juliefeeney.com
JIMMY MAGEE
Sports commentator and broadcaster
“I can’t remember one unpleasant day at school,” says the broadcaster. “Like every other child I was scared when I started – I don’t know what I was scared of. The teachers were very nice.” Magee went to “a small country national school” in Cooley, Co Louth, but it seemed big enough to a boy unused to being around lots of children. “I was the only one at home for a while and I remember thinking some of the children were very bold.”
But he quickly made friends with his new classmates. “I was born in New York and came home just at the start of the war because my parents thought Ireland would be a safe place. Kids would ask me what America was like and I hadn’t a clue. But a sort of mystery surrounded me. Jimmy’s from America. They thought that because I was American I knew Abraham Lincoln personally or I’d helped to build the Statue of Liberty.”
Jimmy Magee’s memoir Memory Man will be published by Gill Macmillan in September
AOIBHINN NÍ SHÚILLEABHÁIN
Broadcaster, teacher and PhD student
Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin was totally unfazed by her first day at Scoil Raifteirí in Castlebar, Co Mayo. “My mum is the vice-principal and she was my teacher,” she says. “So my first day was quite nice. I was an only child at the time and I remember standing at the front steps with mum and my school bag and dad taking my photograph.”
But a surprise awaited her in the school itself. “I was so shocked by other kids crying – I couldn’t understand why they were so upset,” she says. “I didn’t appreciate the fact that my mother was with me for the whole day while they had to say goodbye to their parents. My job was to play with the kids who were really upset. There was one particular boy who was very upset and when his dad had to leave; my mum gave me the task of looking after him. We’re still really good friends.”
DIANA BUNICI
Television presenter
Diana Bunici experienced two very different first days at primary school. The first was in her native Moldova, and she remembers not being nervous at all.
She came from a small village and knew lots of her classmates, and her grandmother worked in the school as a teaching assistant. “For me, it was really exciting and something I was looking forward to. I felt totally at home.”
But there was one surprise in store – the required daily nap. “There were mats arranged like a chest of drawers on a grander scale – each drawer was like a bed and you had your own bed assigned to you. I could never sleep and that day I was so confused – why did I have to sleep in the middle of the day?”
When she was eight, the family moved to Ireland, where she had a very different first day. “I didn’t speak English very well at all,” she says. “And I was wearing a uniform, which I’d never done before. I felt completely alien. But through the help of the students in my class and my teachers I felt at home, even on that first day. There was such curiosity because they’d never met someone from Moldova before. They were full of questions that I couldn’t answer because I couldn’t understand them, but it was kind of exciting.”
Nerves, novelty, confusion and excitement – as Bunici says, “in a way, this was a more traditional first day at school”.
Diana Bunici co-presents Elev8 on RTÉ Two
MICHAEL BARRON
Director of BelongTo, a national youth service for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people in Ireland
If a child is nervous on his or her first day, at least he or she knows that everyone else is in the same boat. But that wasn’t the case for Michael Barron, who started school several months after everyone else.
“I started late because I was sick. I had bad bronchial asthma,” he recalls. “Just one other girl started on the same day. She took a real shine to me but I found her really scary. Whenever I turned around she’d be standing there.” And there was nowhere to hide, because the school was a small one in rural Kilkenny. Barron did settle in, but still found himself missing his grandmother. “She lived with us and I was really close to her as a kid because my parents worked. When I started school I remember wishing I could be at home with her.”
Belongto.org
DARÁINE MULVIHILL
Co-presenter of the Paralympics on Channel 4
“When I started school I felt like I was already grown up,” says Daráine Mulvihill, who is co-presenting Channel 4’s Paralympic Games. “I knew the ropes.”
Gaelscoil na Cille in Ashbourne was familiar to Mulvihill. Not only had she attended a Naíonra playgroup situated on the school grounds, but her mother was a teacher in the school. She believes teachers’ kids are the least likely to cry on their first day. “I think teachers have a certain way with their kids, they wouldn’t tolerate any waterworks. When children get really upset, it could be because they’re getting vibes from their parents – they’re worried about letting them go.”
Her mum wasn’t the only familiar face. “A girl from up the road was born just a month before me and we grew up together and started school on the same day. I have a picture on the wall of my bedroom of the two of us outside the school on our first day – I have my Zig and Zag schoolbag and we both have big grins on our faces. I was dying to get in. We’re still in touch now – I’m coming home for her birthday in a few weeks.”
See paralympics.channel4.com
CONOR DURKAN
Student
This young man from Douglas in Cork was one of just three people in the country to get nine A1s in his Leaving Certificate this year, and he is about to start a degree in mathematical sciences in UCC. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he wasn’t scared of starting school. “I just remember the whole thing as a good experience and a good place to be,” he says.
He was unfazed by the hustle and bustle of the classroom. “I don’t think I knew anybody when I started, but it wasn’t long until I got to know them. I was never a quiet child. I was always talking to other people. We spent the day playing with toys and talking to each other.”
As yet another teacher’s child, he attended the school where his dad taught. “I knew I had to be on my best behaviour because I was going into where my dad was working. But I don’t think I was that interested in learning then – I was kind of lazy.
Launch of new Irish primary
August 27, 2012
GUEST speakers from the Irish language community will be present at the official launch of a new Irish Medium primary school in Cookstown this Thursday night.
Gaelscoil Eoghain, in Chapel Street, will open its doors to pupils on Monday, September 3, after Education Minister, John O’Dowd, granted approval for the school to be fully recognised and funded by his Department.
The launch event will take place on Thursday at 7.30pm at the Glenavon Hotel in the town.
Speakers will include Pilib Ó Ruanaí from Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta, and Liam Flanagan (An Carn).
Entertainment and refreshments will also be provided on the evening.
www.tyronetimes.co.uk
Applications open for grants to study, teach and research in US
August 24, 2012
Applications open tomorrow for awards for postgraduate students, scholars and professionals from the Fulbright Commission in Ireland.
The financial awards support those seeking to study, lecture or do research in the US in the coming year. Stays are for a maximum of a year and there are three types of awards on offer.
The Fulbright student awards are for postgraduate studies, with a grant of up to $20,000 (about €16,000).
The Fulbright scholar and professional awards enable academics and professionals to research or lecture in the US. These too are worth about €16,000 but up to €35,000 if in the Irish language.
There is also a Fulbright foreign language teaching assistantship award, a 10-month grant to enable Irish language teachers to develop their skills by teaching at a US college. Grants are about €20,000.
The Fulbright awards are presented on an annual basis. All applications must be received both in hard copy and online by November 14th.
Una Halligan, chairwoman of the Fulbright Commission in Ireland, said: “The Irish Fulbright awards offer winners the opportunity to study, research, and build relationships in the United States. The Fulbrighters gain invaluable experience that they can share upon their return to Ireland that will set them apart in their fields.”
www.irishtimes.com
Teaching courses may widen entry requirements
August 24, 2012
Primary teaching courses could revert to using interviews or aptitude tests as well as Leaving Certificate results to identify suitable students, under changes being considered by the profession.
There are already proposals to increase the standards needed in Irish, English and maths to be selected for the bachelor of education (BEd) programmes.
But as the inclusion of additional assessments to choose college entrants comes under consideration by third-level bosses, similar plans are already being examined for entry to teacher-training courses.
The Irish Examiner highlighted this week how the better performance of girls and their greater likelihood to study English and Irish at higher level could push the profession further beyond the reach of men.
However, the Teaching Council, which made the proposals last year, said consultations on those suggested changes have yet to begin.
The consultation period will start later this year, and there would be enough lead-in time for any changes to entry requirements to allow students make appropriate choices.
But as well as minimum Leaving Certificate grades, another Teaching Council policy document on teacher-training suggests a review of entry requirements span more than subject levels.
“Selection procedures for initial teacher education should assess, in so far as possible, the broad range of factors which may impact on the applicant’s suitability for entry to the profession,” it says.
It suggests a review of entry requirements and selection procedures, to consider the use of:
- Aptitude tests;
- Structured interviews;
- Significance of previous relevant experience;
- Subject quotas;
- Standard of academic achievement.
The proposals will follow the extension from next year of the BEd from a three to a four-year programme, in line with increased teaching qualification requirements under Education Minister Ruairi Quinn’s literacy and numeracy strategy.
A Teaching Council spokesperson said it will be for the minister to set any new entry requirements, based on consultation and advice from the council.
The developments are being considered as third level chiefs also look at widening selection methods for degrees and other courses, to include measurements other than Leaving Certificate performance. The Irish Universities Association is to report by the end of the year on its plans and the timescale for changes, which it is hoped could take effect in 2015.
In a report to Mr Quinn this week they recommended more general entry courses instead of students picking specialist degrees before starting college, and the option of widening bonus points for subjects other than maths.
www.irishexaminer.com
North’s GCSE top grade percentage rises again
August 24, 2012
NORTHERN IRELAND students have registered another strong performance in the GCSE exams, with the percentage of top grades up once again.
Results out yesterday showed that 8.9 per cent of entries in the North achieved the top A* grade, compared with 8.5 per cent in 2011. There was also a small increase in the A*-C bracket, with 75.6 per cent of entries achieving these grades – up 0.8 per cent on last year.
About 32,000 pupils sat GCSEs in Northern Ireland this year. Girls are still outperforming boys when it comes to results – at the A* level by 3.8%, at A*-A by 9.4 per cent and at A*-C by 7.3 per cent.
The results were published by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ).
This year saw strong Northern Ireland performances in the sciences, maths and technology. The percentage of entries achieving A*-C in chemistry was 93.6 per cent (93.3 per cent in 2011), in physics 93.7 per cent (92.6 per cent in 2011), and in biology 90 per cent (91.4 per cent in 2011).
Entries in biology and chemistry remained steady. Physics saw a fall of 2.8 per cent in entries from 2,966 in 2011 to 2,884 in 2012.
In mathematics and design and technology, there were also rises in the percentage of entries gaining top grades.
In mathematics 62.9 per cent of entries achieved grades A*- C (60.9per cent in 2011). In design and technology, performance at A*-C rose to 73.9 per cent (from 71.3 per cent in 2011).
The JCQ noted a fall in modern languages entries. After gains last year, 2012 saw a drop in entries for most modern language subjects. French, Irish and Spanish all saw a fall in entry figures. In contrast, entries for German rose 6.2 per cent to 1,138. The most popular language remained French, with 6,402 entries. – (PA)
www.irishtimes.com
The sum of Irish and maths
August 23, 2012
Sir, –
I did not have to wait long to see the customary letter questioning the value and usefulness of Irish in the Leaving Certificate. For Andrew Doyle Clifden’s (August 21st) benefit, trigonometry is triantánacht in Irish, which roughly translates to “the study of triangles”.
Most mathematical terms in Irish are similar to their English language counterparts, as they all have their origins in Greek. Calculus is calculas in Irish. I would be more concerned that students would understand the concepts rather than the terms.
In certain cases, Irish language terms are self-explanatory, acting as aides-mémoires to students and deepening their understanding of certain concepts. Hypotenuse is “taobhagán” which translates as “a support/side”. To understand the English term one needs to appreciate the Greek prefix “hypo” and and the Greek verb “teinein” (to stretch) – granted a student studying French may make the link with the verb “tenir”, and thus make the connection that the hypo-tenuse is the “very holding/supporting” side of the triangle, or put simply, the long side. Taobhagán is a much simpler term and is self-explanatory to an Irish speaker. There is very little in the term “isosceles” that a student would understand. However, in Irish, the term “triantán comhchosach” is self-explanatory – “an equal legged triangle”.
Students who have achieved a high grade in higher-level mathematics through Irish in their Leaving Certificate and who wish to continue to study mathematics at third level will have to do so in English as there is no third-level course in mathematics through Irish. I am sure over the four years in university, these able students will pick up the few terms required to impress any future employer.
Students who studied mathematics through Irish will have the terms both in Irish and English, whereas the candidate who studied mathematics in English may not have the Irish terms. That both will be excellent mathematicians is beyond doubt.
Yours, etc,
Colm Ó hAnluain,
Avenue Belle Vue, Waterloo, Belgium.
www.irishtimes.com
