Board of Education (R.O.I.)02 May 25

Council of Schools Charities’ highlight supports for education

The importance of people of minority faiths having continued access to education in their own ethos was highlighted at the Council of Schools Charities’ annual meeting on Monday (April 28). Looking back to his own education, guest speaker Minister Neale Richmond told the representatives of schools and charities that schools instil an ethos and value system in the lives of young people which provide a bedrock for them and their communities for life.

The Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade outlined some of the challenges and opportunities facing education and pledged to maintain an open line of communication in relation to issues experienced by those represented by the Council of Schools Charities organisation.

The Council of Schools Charities is an organisation chaired and organised by Protestant Aid Charitable Services to ensure positive collaboration between schools, charities and the Secondary Education Committee (SEC) with the ultimate objective of assisting Protestant families to send their children to a secondary school in accordance with their ethos.

He said his school experiences were seared into his brain and participation in events like the Concern Christmas Fast and Whitechurch Parish’s connection with Rwanda which began after the genocide there, impacted his ministry in Foreign Affairs and Trade today where he has responsibility for international development and diaspora.

He outlined his 16 year career in politics to date and said that in the first few months of his current ministry he had had the opportunity to visit countries experiencing disadvantage. He would travel to Ukraine in the coming weeks as well as Sudan and Brazil, he said adding that a planned visit to Gaza had been postponed twice.

Thanking his parents for his education and everyone who worked in the area both professionally and voluntarily, he said that the meeting was a good opportunity to open up a trusted line of communication and that his door was always open.

In the area of education he said there were both challenges and opportunity, noting that “things are tight and are at the precipice of whether they would get tighter or be maintained” at the current level. Referring to the global geopolitical events,he said many factors were out of the State’s control. “I am scared by what happening in the US and some of Europe but it is an opportunity for us in Ireland to show what our values are,” he stated. It was important to prioritise key issues facing people on a daily basis, he added.

Archbishop Michael Jackson also addressed the meeting which he described as an important way of drawing together perspectives and capacity and enabling charities to work to the best advantage of those who they want to serve.

“Every year we hear that it gets tighter to deliver what we want to deliver – that is the comfort and assurance that our children can be educated in an ethos where they can flourish and their parents and guardians can be confident. That is not to say it is exclusive but we are a minority and we want to facilitate children to be members of this State,” he commented.

Vivienne Rountree,Operations and Support Manager for the SEC which administers the Protestant Block Grant on behalf of the Department of Education, outlined the work of the SEC.She detailed the eligibility criteria and the application process for families who seek a grant. Three new allowances had been introduced, she said: the single parent allowance, multiple birth allowance and a 3+ allowance.

She said that application numbers for SEC grants had reduced in recent years and was interested to explore the reasons for this. This was echoed by Geoff Scargill,Head of Charitable Services at Protestant Aid, who chaired the meeting.

Discussion around the table questioned whether the ethos or religion of a school was less important to children who wanted to attend the same school as their friends and whether the emphasis on the need to attend a Protestant school was dying either because of the rise in community schools or people becoming more secular.

Information on the SEC grant can be found at www.secgrant.ie. School bursars have information on charities which support families in the education of their children.