Just what is Labour Party policy on private schools?
Leader Ivana Bacik sends her daughters to a €6,000-a-year private school while the party’s manifesto advocates an end to State subsidies for teachers’ salaries in fee-paying schools
NEW Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik has refused to answer questions about an apparent contradiction between Labour party policy and her choice to educate her children privately.
Labour has taken a sharply critical position on private schools, led by its education spokesman Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.
However the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal that Ms Bacik sends her own children to a €6,000-a-year private school in south Dublin.
Mr Ó Ríordáin said in February that funding for private schools ‘should be phased out’.
Labour’s last election manifesto also pledged that the party would ‘progressively remove State subsidies from the 7% of secondary schools that are private and fee-paying’.
Ms Bacik has also voiced her personal aversion to private schools in the past.
Although she attended the private Alexandra College in Milltown, Dublin 6, on a scholarship, the Labour leader later said that she was unlikely to send her children to a private school.
In an Irish Times interview in 1999, Ms Bacik said: ‘I found Alex very different. It was a huge culture shock. It was single-sex for a start and the students were from much wealthier backgrounds.
‘The school was very good academically and we had some really exceptional teachers but, to begin with, I found boarding school difficult. I was only 11 and I found the whole atmosphere rather intimidating.
‘I liked Alex’s strong feminist tradition though, but I was much more socialist than the school.
‘If I had children, I doubt if I would send them to private schools. I believe State schooling is preferable. Private schools have an unfair advantage. They have more money going in and students tend to do better.’
Ms Bacik follows in a tradition of Labour Party leaders – including Ruairí Quinn, Pat Rabbitte and Joan Burton – who chose to educate their children privately while the party was advocating cuts to State funding of private schools.
Before becoming party leader, Ms Bacik called for ‘a national conversation about how we achieve a modern, secular and equality-based education system for the Ireland of today, and what we hope to achieve for tomorrow’.
In its election manifesto for 2020, Labour promised to abolish the €90m annual subsidy that private schools get for teachers’ salaries.
The manifesto added: ‘At present, access to highly competitive university education is dominated by students from private schools who have an unfair advantage of having additional resources from fees, combined with teachers whose salaries are paid by society as a whole. Labour wants all schools to foster excellence and to provide genuine equality of opportunity.’
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin has also said it is his political mission to ‘stamp out the elitism in how schools admit pupils’.
He told Newstalk radio in February this year that funding of private schools should be phased out.
He said private schools ‘do have a disproportionate impact on Irish education policy’ and added that the current model of private schooling was one of several aspects of Irish education that ‘we need to question’.
He said: ‘We have to ask ourselves why we have 4,000 schools in a country with a population the size of Manchester? We have a huge number of schools.
‘We are obsessed traditionally with separating children on the basis of religion, gender and income. I don’t really see how that benefits children.
‘We just seem to carry on with what has been passed down through generations. I find that frustrating.
‘I think everybody assumes the Irish education system is grand and doesn’t really need to change. But for
‘If I had children, I doubt I would send them to private schools’
‘Private schools have an unfair advantage’
‘For many people, the system does fail’
many people, [the system] does fail them.’
Mr Ó Ríordáin said he understands the motivation of parents who choose a private school, but he believes we should be looking at education ‘as the great enabler of every young person’.
However, he doesn’t believe the State funding of fee-charging schools should end in one fell swoop.
‘We can easily make a grandstanding decision that we’d withdraw funding overnight. That’s not realistic. What we’d like to do is phase it out over a period of time,’ he said. In February, Labour tabled a Bill that proposed giving primary schools 10 years to end single-sex admissions and secondary schools 15 years.
Labour’s head of communications, Paddy Cole, said this weekend that where Ms Bacik sends her children to school is ‘a private issue’. He said: ‘Ever since Ivana Bacik was first elected to the Oireachtas in 2007, she has consistently sought to protect the privacy, confidentiality and security of her family and her children, who are private citizens and not public figures. Following her election as Labour Party leader, this position has not changed and will not change.’
When Ms Bacik was elected to the Dáil last summer in a by-election, she was photographed at the count centre with her two children and her husband, who were all named at the time in a picture distributed by the PA news wire.