Dr. Ken Fennelly:

I thank the committee for inviting us to this meeting and for the opportunity to make this presentation. I am attending on behalf of Church of Ireland and Protestant primary schools. I am joined by Dr. Paul Colton, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross.

The last time I appeared before the committee in October, I outlined in some detail the costs involved in running a primary school. I have also noted the committee's recent report on these costs. Instead of running through the figures again, I would like to focus on some key issues of concern for the Protestant religious minority on this matter.

Our focus is the provision of suitable primary education for the children of parents of minority Christian religious traditions. In that regard, we view our schools as part of the existing provision for pluralism and diversity in the Irish education system, a network that is embedded in towns and villages across the country. Undoubtedly, every committee member will be aware of the value that local Church of Ireland communities in their constituencies place on having their own primary schools.

We are fully aware that there is a cost involved for us as taxpayers to provide primary level education for all of our children. The officials from the Department of Education and Skills will undoubtedly have exact figures on those costs. However, there is also an obligation on all of us to ensure that the best possible education is available to every child in the State. The impressive range of planned school buildings listed in the Department's five-year plan, with a budget of €1.5 billion, is a display of the necessity of continuing to provide such a quality level of educational infrastructure.

We are also conscious that, as we meet here today, a value for money, VFM, review of small schools is nearing publication. The terms of reference of that VFM states that 50 pupils or fewer is taken as the benchmark for a small primary school. The last such review was conducted as recently as 2006 and continued a policy of supporting schools where numbers were small. Obviously, this policy has now been reversed and small schools are struggling to cope with the shock of having their minor works grants ceased and their capitation core funding reduced, along with the thresholds for the allocation of teachers being significantly increased and the VFM's sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

To retain a school's second teacher in September 2014, it will need 20 pupils, an increase of eight pupils or a 66.6% increase on 2011's figures. A 14% increase is needed to retain a third teacher and a 7% increase is needed to retain a fourth teacher. This clearly points to a policy of targeting the level of provision to smaller schools. The Minister has stated that no one could support a pupil-teacher ratio of 12:1 and that, at 19:1, one-teacher schools would be better off in their allocations than schools with two or more teachers. He has argued that the current 28:1 ratio is better than the levels that pertained in the 1990s.

As any school principal in a one or two-teacher school will agree, the reality of life in that school is that the whole school - junior infants to sixth class - is in one or two classes. One and two-teacher classrooms are multi-age, multi-grade and multi-ability with mainstreamed special needs students. Modern curricular demands and the Minister's strategies on literacy and numeracy, along with the increased amount of administrative work, all add up to creating a very different school to that which existed 20 ago. This is an extremely busy educational space and needs more resources, not less.

In terms of Church of Ireland schools, we are of the view that any policy that seeks to close or wind down a school of fewer than 56 pupils or two teachers will have a disproportionate effect on the Protestant minority. Based on the returns of 2011-12, 97 of our schools have fewer than 56 pupils. This accounts for nearly 50% of all Protestant primary schools. A policy of closing schools of fewer than 56 pupils will close half the Protestant primary schools in Ireland. This is what we are facing and is the reason that our community is anxious.

We submit that the aim of the Minister and his Department must be to support a diversity of patronage types through the maintaining of current provision, where reasonable. The fact remains that primary schools exist to serve small children who cannot be expected to travel on buses or across large amounts of countryside in the depths of winter. Such a policy would not value and respect children.

However, we also recognise that there are situations where it is reasonable and sensible to close or amalgamate schools, especially where those schools are in close proximity and there is available capital to provide the same, or better, quality accommodation than the school to be closed. In this regard, we wish to highlight to the committee that the Protestant minority has been down this road before. Since the 1960s, we have closed or amalgamated nearly 200 primary schools and reduced our number of secondary schools from 46 to 27. A further two schools were closed in recent years. It cannot be claimed that the Protestant communities are not being realistic in this regard.

The geographical spacing of our current network of primary schools did not happen by accident, but was part of a planning process in dioceses around the country from the late 1960s onwards. Our difficulty is that, where a Protestant school closes, it is unlikely ever to be reopened. We must be mindful of the next generation of members of our church and their right to be educated in a school of their own faith. It is part of our duty of stewardship and is part of our cultural tradition.

I will conclude by thanking members for the opportunity to highlight these issues this afternoon. I hope that I have conveyed some sense of the level of anxiety that exists among the Protestant community towards the VFM review of small primary schools, which has been in gestation since 2011. I suggest that these issues, which we will discuss today, go to the heart of questions such as who we are as a society, what do we value and how do we support that which is culturally distinctive.

In recent days, the Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross has further consulted with his schools on the issue of the cost of running smaller primary schools. The committee may be interested in learning this information from him as a primary school patron at first hand.