Principals will examine the issue of school amalgamation at their annual conference in Tullamore this Thursday and Friday. Some 70 secondary schools are going through the process at the moment. This matter will be top of the agenda along with their other main cause of concern - school league tables. Over 400 principals are expected to attend the Secondary Schools Principals' Association of Ireland.
The fact that the Department of Education and Science is currently active in 25 amalgamation projects involving 70 schools across all sectors is "clearly a matter of critical urgency", according to Ray Kennedy, of the SSPAI.
As to league tables, principals want to know if the publication of such lists will provide clarity or confusion and who is to benefit from this information. The author of the report Do Schools Differ?, Dr Emer Smyth, of the Economic and Social Research Institute, is to deliver the keynote address. School leaders will discuss questions such as how policies on class organisation, subject choice, disciplinary systems and quality pupil-teacher interaction will be dealt with in a situation where school league tables exist. At the conference, principals will be looking at the fact that according to the Central Statistics Office, the next 10 years will see a decline of about 10,000 pupils in secondary schools. They are also concerned that schools and communities will be facing declining rolls and empty classrooms. According to Ray Kennedy, "the management of this process can involve a poignancy un-felt by well-motivated but distant planners operating from Dublin".
The conference will hear from two principals who have recently completed or almost this process - Frank Smith, principal of St Joseph's CBS in Portarlington, Co Laois, and Sr Maria Mullen, former principal of the Convent of Sacred Heart Secondary School, Roscrea, Co Tipperary. Frank Murray, chairman of the Commission on School Accommodation, will also address the issue. In Roscrea, three schools - the vocational school, the CBS and the convent school - were amalgamated after a 15-year process to open this year as Colaiste Phobal Ros Cre. Mullen, who was principal of the Sacred Heart school for 25 years, stresses the importance of communication between parents, management, students, staff and the Department when a school is amalgamating.
"Parents' nerves get a bit unfrayed," as a school prepares to merge, she explains. "The numbers diminish, the smaller schools that are going to close loose pupils," she says, and this impacts on subject choice and on the number of teachers in a school. "The Department has to make allowances for that and they do but you have to cajole and bargain every year and make allowances for the numbers."
She also stresses the "huge time" that such a process involves with meetings to plan, explain, prepare and set up structures eating into an ordinary day.
