School principal struggles to balance education with bloated energy bills

Ensuring quality teaching and learning should be the key concern of Co Cork primary school principal Siobhán Buckley but instead keeping the lights on is what worries her most this year.

The principal of Presentation National School, Millstreet, Co Cork – a 238-pupil mainstream school with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) class – says the school’s capitation grant needs to be increased this year to pay for bills like oil and electricity.

“For the last academic year alone, I spent €4,592 on oil – that’s a lot of money – the bill has doubled for oil. I spent €6,500 on ESB. I got a bill in the month of May for €2,500 for ESB and I was reeling over it. Normally it would be €900 or €1,100,” she said.

“Year on year you can’t manage this, but we’re going to have to keep the lights on and heat the building. Schools are sprawling buildings with lots of rooms. My key role is to ensure quality teaching and learning yet in actual fact I’m trying to keep the show afloat. It’s soul-destroying,” she added.

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Insufficient capitation grant

The school receives a capitation grant of €40,000 from the Department of Education, which Ms Buckley says needs to be increased.

“What I can’t understand is that these politicians can see their bills rising at home and yet they don’t realise that the bills in schools are rising too. Last year, there was a surplus [of money] from the previous year that we were able to use. The school had been closed for a portion of that year due to Covid, so we were able to take from that year. This year, I don’t know how we’re going to do it.”

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Primary schools received a 2.5 per cent increase in standard capitation funding for the 2020/2021 school year, according to the department, which was in addition to the 5 per cent increase in capitation for the previous school year.

“Any further increases in the capitation grant would have to be considered in the context of budget measures,” a department spokesman added.

Presentation NS Millstreet operates a book rental scheme and asks parents of pupils for a yearly voluntary contribution of €20 per pupil, or a maximum of €50 per family, but Ms Buckley says many parents can’t afford to pay it.

“I would like to think that we have taken the pressure off parents with the book rental scheme. We have cut back on workbooks and instead we’re using copybooks. That was a conscious decision. We have not put undue pressure on any parent. We have an understanding that although every parent each year is asked for a contribution towards photocopying, we have a direct provision centre in Millstreet and some parents haven’t got it, they can’t afford it. We exercise discretion. We may have about 20 Ukrainian children starting in September as well and I’m going to do my best to get uniforms for them.”

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Raising funds

The school depends on fundraising to properly resource classrooms, said Ms Buckley. Last year, the school’s parents’ association raised €1,500, which meant that every classroom could be equipped with a box of materials for science, technology, engineering and maths.

“Our sixth-class girls had a cake sale and I asked them, ‘what will you use the money for?’ They said, ‘we need new footballs and basketballs. They’re all burst’,” Ms Buckley noted.

“For hands-on concrete materials, we have to find the money for resources. The new maths curriculum is going to be heavily materials-dependent. Every class will need a maths equipment box and possibly one for every child so that every child can explore the concrete material for themselves. For IT, I bought bee-bots, which are mini coding devices that are very hands-on. Infants right up to sixth love them. I invested in construction materials for infants and then more complex stuff for fourth as well,” she said.

The department has been “excellent” with regards to funding the school’s ASD classroom and IT facilities, said Ms Buckley. “They definitely have their finger on the pulse when it comes to ASD in mainstream education… the funding they gave in terms of set-up grants, furniture, IT… it was excellent.”

She added: “We now have interactive whiteboards in our classrooms, but those are just a very small piece of the puzzle.”

Under Project Ireland 2040, the education sector will receive approximately €4.4 billion in capital investment over the period 2021-2025, said the department spokesman.

This investment will facilitate an increased focus on the modernisation of existing school stock and help transition the school system for an era of net-zero carbon by 2050, he added.

Meanwhile, Ms Buckley said: “I think any principal’s nightmare or fear is the unexpected… the leak in the roof, something unprecedented. Secondary schools get double our capitation grant but we’re all running the same buildings. The difference in capitation has to stop. It’s discriminatory.”