I would like to pay tribute to the dedication and professionalism of principals, teachers and boards of governors of our controlled schools, who together strive to provide high quality education for the 143,669 pupils who walk through their doors every day and help them to meet their potential.
Our principals should be encouraged to celebrate the learning, growth and development of their pupils as individuals and the added value provided by great teachers in our schools, not have their excellent work taking second seat to discussions over insufficient resources to cover the basic running of their schools.
The importance of education cannot be underestimated and we must always have children and young people’s interests at the centre of it.
The Controlled Schools’ Support Council (CSSC) would again warn those with responsibility to fund the system of the impact that being required to function within inadequate and reducing budgets is having on school leaders.
CSSC is calling for action to be taken to address the systemic challenges being faced by Northern Ireland’s schools. The answer is simple – the Department of Education needs to have sufficient resource to adequately fund our schools.
For too many years now schools have faced hard decisions relating to what curriculum they can offer, what staff they can afford to employ and, in some cases, how they are going to keep the lights on.
While finance is one of the priority areas that needs to be addressed, principals are also having their resilience tested by societal expectations of the education system. Schools are seen as a panacea for a wide range of community ills, all to be tackled with little or no resource.
Increasingly bureaucratic processes taking educators away from the core focus of teaching and a real feeling that schools and teachers are not valued are additional pressures that schools are having to deal with.
The number of children presenting with increasingly complex special educational needs is on the rise, which is affecting both special schools, many of which are at capacity, and mainstream schools, both requiring additional resources to support pupils.
Finally, CSSC supports and advocates on behalf of nearly half of Northern Ireland’s schools, including nursery, special and primary schools, plus non-selective and grammar post-primary schools.
CSSC will continue to work in collaboration with key stakeholders to address the systemic challenges, and raise the profile of our schools and highlight the value of education.
BARRY MULHOLLAND
Chief executive, Controlled Schools’ Support Council
Explanation needed as to why Sinn Féin claims such electoral support
We need young politicians with the talents of the new lord mayor of Belfast, John Finucane. Personable, intelligent and capable, he should be an asset to our politics.
His family, like so many others, suffered terrible tragedy as a consequence of political hatreds that played out on the streets. Yet, he chooses to represent Sinn Féin, a party that feels that the IRA campaign of terror during the period we too simplistically call ‘the Troubles’ was justified and necessary.
It requires explanation why the most extraordinary manifestation of hatred here, namely a movement that in living memory tried to butcher its way to a united Ireland, claims such electoral support.
Does John Finucane support his party’s position on the past? If so which of the IRA’s atrocities does he particularly believe were necessary to get us to where we are today?
Most of us simply want our politicians to make this part of the world socially and economically successful. Whatever our constitutional preferences, we still have to live together.
Does he represent a real change in our politics in a more constructive direction or is he the same politics of old but with a fresher face? Can republicanism/nationalism concentrate on making this place that we share and belongs to us all, work, as its means of promoting its constitutional preference?
Whatever his position we should respect the office he holds. If he does not share a similar view to those of us who take the clear position that violence outside the law was wrong and unnecessary, we should in any event agree to disagree with him on the past but be prepared to work with him if he is prepared to work constructively for the benefit of us all.
Finally, it is an amazing act of grace, which needs acknowledged, that those who gathered to remember the Irish who fought at the Somme together should quietly accept the participation of a representative of Sinn Féin in the commemoration of that battle; particularly those who during the Troubles lost their loved ones at the hands of violent Republicanism.
TREVOR RINGLAND
Holywood, Co Down
Irish concern for ‘indigenous Palestinians’
It never ceases to amaze me that a core of Irish nationalists are so concerned about the plight of the ‘indigenous Palestinians’ and their suppression by the ‘colonialist Zionists’.
If only these Irish were as concerned as the colonialism, land grab/settlement, apartheid and genocide the Irish, more than any other nationality, perpetrated on the indigenous natives of north America.
The Irish had no connection with that geographical landmass yet they settled, slaughtered, stole and stayed and a race of people were obliterated.
General George Armstrong Custer was so enamoured with that little Irish ditty the Garryowen that he insisted it be played (approximately 70 per cent of the Seventh Cavalry were either first or second generation Irish) prior to his troops committing acts of barbarity on the Sioux or Cherokee.
The Garryowen is as welcome on the still maintained apartheid reservations caused by Irish behaviours as Wagner’s music is in certain parts of Israel.
Will Francis Rice (July 3) call for the removal of the Irish colonialists from the Americas and the return of the land the Irish stole from the indigenous natives some 200 years ago?
Francis Rice could not name one indigenous Palestinian from 3000 BC to 1948 AD nor any battle or war fought by indigenous Palestinians during that period against any foreign nor domestic enemy let alone the indigenous Palestinian who lead them.
PETER BAUM
Essex, England
Olives in north Belfast
Some of your younger readers might find it difficult to believe that 25 years ago one or few of our local politicians were actually in denial of the science on climate change. So I planted a baby olive tree. And sure enough, to supplement my annual crop which already includes a bountiful harvest of figs and grapes, I am now expecting my first harvest of olives.
PETER EMERSON
Belfast BT14
