OVERCROWDING in Limerick primary schools has reached the point that parents have called school principals from maternity wards to get their new born children on to their waiting lists.
And the situation is set to get worse with primary schools in County Limerick ranked as the worst for overcrowded classes in Ireland with the highest percentage of children in classes of thirty or more pupils.
According to figures from the Department of Education, 28 per cent of all children in Limerick county are in the larger classes as opposed to an average of 22 per cent nationwide.
And the official figures don’t demonstrate the full extent of the problem, Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) Limerick representative Joe Lyons told the Limerick Post.
“There is no forward planning. Parents have called from the maternity ward to enroll their newborns. They are putting their children’s names down in five or six different schools to secure a place on the waiting lists”.
Mr Lyons said he knows of schools where children’s names have already been enrolled for 2020.
“You hear stories about Dublin where parents are queueing overnight to get their children’s names down for school and we’re not far off that here”.
“Schools are carrying numbers for a year, so a school that has enough children enrolled for September 2017 to merit an extra teacher will have to wait another year to get one.
“More classes include children of foreign nationals who may come to school with no English at all and children who would otherwise have gone to special schools and are now going to mainstream schools with no extra supports. A lot of the challenges facing schools are not reflected in the statistics,” he said.
The INTO representative is convinced that the entire debacle is “down to bad planning”.
“In the Celtic Tiger years, permissions were given to build five and six hundred houses on the outskirts of Limerick with no provision for the fact that the people who bought those houses would have children and need school places. You only have to drive around the city and see the National schools with prefab upon prefabs in the yards. The urban schools are bursting at the seams”.
“And the rural schools have not escaped. The numbers needed for a third teacher were changed overnight from 49 to 55. If you have a school with 53 or 54 children, then you have two teachers, one teaching juniors, seniors, first, and second class and the other teaching third, fourth, fifth and sixth classes,” he explained.
The INTO members could give Education Minister Richard Bruton a lesson in practical mathematics, according to Mr Lyons.
“There has to be some formula which says that if you put up 100 houses there will be so many hundred children down the line living in those houses and needing schools. But that hasn’t been looked at so children are being educated in huge class numbers in prefabs and moved to schools far away from where they live to get a place,” he said.
Read similar stories in the Limerick Post Education section.
