Madam, – Philipp Matuschka’s contribution to the debate on fee-paying schools (October 3rd) has prompted me to contribute from my angle, that of a primary school principal in an acutely disadvantaged area in Dublin’s north inner city. I work in a system which is still dominated by the influence of the churches, which is continually starved of resources and is still hopelessly riddled with inequality.
Many of the exchanges on your Letters Page almost entirely miss the point – we have to strive to ensure that every school in the country is worthy of our children thus negating the motivation and reasoning behind the parental choice for fee-paying schools.
Every school should be a palace, but we cannot achieve this goal by contributing €100 million a year to an exclusive club while 30 per cent of our most vulnerable children still suffer from basic reading problems.
Our schools must reflect the type of society that we all want – one based on equality and parity of esteem. The parental choice for fee-paying schools has been well defended by your correspondents over the past number of weeks, but it is not the responsibility of the State or the taxpayer to support these schools and the educational apartheid that they promote. – Yours, etc,