Anseo.net - If I were the Minister for Education

Hangovers are never a positive experience and some are harder to shake than others, especially when it comes to education. We have so many bad (pedagogically speaking) ideas that seem to persist in t…

Choice. This is the word most used to combat my argument that we should scrap the patronage model. When it comes to education, it seems that almost everyone thinks they should have a choice of the fl…

The National Educational Psychological Service (NEPS) is probably one of the most paradoxical. It is completely undervalued and under-resourced by the Department of Education but it provides one of t…

When one looks at the number of agencies involved in education, one has to ask why there are so many and what do they actually do. The NCSE is the National Council for Special Education. Back when th…

Let’s call a spade a spade. As much as Gaelscoileanna don’t encourage it, they have become an unofficial “private school” for Middle Ireland. Everybody knows it but saying it out loud attracts vitrio…

We’re well used to cuts in primary school. Over the last decade or so, funding to primary schools has been chopped at every angle, sometimes very obviously and sometimes in a kind of invisible way.

T…

Joe McHugh used to be famous for being the Minister for the Gaeltacht despite not speaking Irish. He then became famous for re-learning the Irish language to fluency. Now he just can’t stop talking I…

In some ways, everyone probably already knows that secondary schools are funded better than primary schools. However, to what extent is this true? In this episode, I explore the different areas where…

For our first episode I thought we'd start with a light, unemotive topic! In 2019, 97.5% of Irish primary schools have a religious patron body, with all but 3 of these schools under a Christian patro…