Once-posh boarding schools are now a haven for the desperate

LIKE lots of young girls who made their way through Enid Blyton’s seminal series of books, Malory Towers and St Clare’s, I dreamed of escaping to boarding school. I know my mother dreamed of sending me to one.

It didn’t matter that these schools full of mischievous but ultimately good-hearted teenagers were relics of post-war Britain, where ginger beer and buttered crumpets were all the rage – both impossible to find in an 80s Quinnsworth supermarket.

These places sounded romantic and fun, surrounded all day every day by your peers and then returning home for the holidays, to families who missed you and appreciated you fully now that you were back.

It didn’t happen. Instead, it was a local convent school, which I was lucky enough to enjoy.

Caoimhe Ryan from Prosperous in Co. Kildare got to go to boarding school this year, but it was by no means her dream come true. In fact, it was a last resort for her desperate family, who say they couldn’t find anywhere near where they live or even in the entire county of Kildare to send her to secondary school.

Mum Caroline was visibly upset as she told RTÉ News this week how she worries about her 13-year-old daughter every day, in a school over 120km away in Co. Tipperary, where she has yet to settle or make any friends. But it was their only solution.

After contacting the Department of Education for help, they were offered nine hours of home tuition a week. But Caroline, a mother of four, works as a midwife, while her husband is often abroad or away for his job as an electrical engineer, meaning that the option of home schooling was out of the question.

Besides, as Covid reminded us only too well, for most people the social aspect of places like schools and colleges is every bit as important as the education you get, especially in the formative years. Granted, there will always be happy loners or those who struggle in social settings, but this exposure to group learning is where we grasp the fundamentals of how to interact with other people who aren’t related to us.

Indeed, we know that some children have found it impossible to return to a school setting since the pandemic – they got too used to being at home and are now refusing to go back to a place where for them life is harder. So offering up nine tuition

hours to a child who can’t get into a secondary school is no kind of solution.

This year, 119 such offers were granted to students. Even then, it would seem they were left on their own, as one parent in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, told how she had to find tutors by posting ads on Facebook, or asking friends who are teachers to step in and help.

No other support, she said, was given by the Department of Education, and it took her until October to find people available to teach her child geography, history and English. They’ve found it ‘impossible’ to find a maths teacher.

So far, five areas in the country have been identified as communities where the availability of school places has not kept up with the growth of population.

As well as north Kildare, there are problems in north Wicklow, and in parts of Dublin, Cork and Galway.

This is no anomaly, it’s a crisis.

Mind you, from what Education Minister Norma Foley has said, it does seem her department believes it has identified some schools where there are free spots.

‘Within Kildare, we can point to availability of school places in first year,’ she told RTÉ. ‘At the end of the day, parents do have parental choice. They can decide where they want their child to attend school or where they might not want their child to attend school. But I can with certainty say that there is availability of places in the Kildare area.’

Which throws up the ‘good school’ question. And who doesn’t want to send their kid to a good school?

BUT while some parents might be happy to go farther afield to get access to a school with a strong GAA tradition, or a place known for its academic strengths, the obsession with certain feepaying schools in Ireland – most of them in Dublin – is often viewed with bemusement by those raised beyond the Pale.

And there’s a good argument to be made that in places where there is less choice, students often end up getting an education in an institution where there is more diversity, where there is more equality, and where there is little or no rubbish about a ‘school network’ that might somehow benefit them in later life.

Not that any of that is going to change any time soon. Not when so many parents patently agonise over doing what they believe is best for their kids. Which brings us back to making sure they have a school to go to – any school.