100,000 more pupils in our primary schools by next decade
Bealtaine 1, 2013
PRIMARY school pupil enrolments will grow by up to 100,000 by 2021, according to latest projections from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
It means a jump of 20pc on the 2011 figures, with the number of five to 12-year-olds in the population expected to rise from about 500,000 to 600,000 in the decade. The boom in primary enrolments is expected to remain reasonably stable between 2021 and 2026, before starting to drop.
The surge at primary level will work its way through to second- level, reaching its peak there between 2021 and 2026. The CSO projects a 31-34pc rise in enrolments at secondlevel, ranging between 106,00 and 117,000, in the decade to 2021.
While extra enrolments mean more schools and more teachers, in the current economic climate it also means available funds will be stretched further.
Priority
The Department of Education is adopting a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” approach to cope with extra demand.
Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has said the priority is for every school-age child to have a place in a classroom. The five-year school building programme – which is costing €2bn – is focused on areas of population growth and this year, for instance, there is no budget for maintenance and repairs to existing schools.
The 2013 programme will deliver over 25,000 permanent school places, almost 21,000 of which will be additional, and the remainder will replace temporary or unsatisfactory accommodation.
Professor Alan Barrett, of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), said yesterday that the school-building programme should take account of changing needs.
A department spokesman said that the focus of the fiveyear programme was on meeting the obvious demand at primary level and second level up to 2016.
Recruitment
She said that Prof Barrett’s proposal was an interesting one and that it was worthy of consideration. The rising enrolments also have implications for teacher recruitment and the department predicts that about 660 extra primary teachers will be needed each year to cope with growing enrolments.
That is on top of about 870 new appointments annually to replace teachers who retire or leave for other reasons. But the department has ways of controlling teacher numbers in order to keep within budget.
A series of cuts in recent years in areas such as resource and English language teaching has kept a lid on teacher levels – even though enrolments had started to rise. At second-level, changes in arrangements for the allocation of career guidance teachers, has removed about 500 jobs from schools.
A change in the pupil-teacher ratio can also see hundreds of jobs disappear from the system in the the stroke of a pen.
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