Just 200 primary schools out of Ireland’s total of 3,300 would sufficiently serve the needs of parents wanting a non-religious education for their children, a leading Church of Ireland educationalist said last night at a seminar on denominational education organised by The Iona Institute.
Dr Ken Fennelly, Secretary of the Church of Ireland Board of Education, revealed that he had arrived at his working figure of 200 through a comparison of figures for non-religious parents with primary schoolchildren with schools offering primary schooling to Ireland’s Protestant community.
In his address (http://www.ionainstitute.ie/assets/files/Ken_Fennelly_talk.pdf [1]), Dr Fennelly said that he had asked the Central Statistics Office for “a breakdown of figures for parents with a child between the ages of 5 and 12 according to religion or lack of”. Out of a total of 587,014 parents, 27,238 “were expressly no religion or 4.6%”.
He said this equates to the number of Protestant children in the same age-bracket in the country and that this number is served by “nearly 200 schools”.
He concluded: “Given that the two sets of figures are comparable, and that less than 200 schools is enough to serve the Protestant minority then it would not be, in my estimation, too much of a leap to say that the same number would serve non-religious parents.”
Also addressing meeting was Professor Eamonn Conway (http://www.ionainstitute.ie/assets/files/Eamonn_Conway_talk.pdf [2]),
head of Theology and Religious Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He described as “bizarre” the proposal to teach a compulsory course on world religions – ‘Education about Religions and Beliefs – in faith-based schools.
He said: “It is bizarre, in my view, that a faith-based school would be required to offer what is essentially a secularist understanding of religious faith…its introduction in faith-based schools will undoubtedly adversely affect religious instruction and a faith-based school’s characteristic ethos. The issue needs careful and urgent attention.”
Taking up Dr Fennelly’s theme on non-religious demand for schools, Prof. Conway asserted that the main responsibility for providing non-religious schools for those who want them lies with the State, not the Churches, while “co-operation in the policy of divestment should be conditional upon tangible commitments in regard to non-interference in the implementation of the characteristic spirit of schools that remain faith-based. This includes in regard to anti-bullying policies, policies on sex education and so on. Incidentally, we urgently need the development of proper faith-based policies in these areas”.