CCMS have moved to the final stage of their plan to close Clintyclay PS. This has required that the SELB publish a development proposal which will be open for consultation for a period of two months before the Minister for Education, John O’Dowd, will have to decide whether to approve or reject the CCMS proposal.
This move does not affect the school’s own proposal to transform to integrated status which will be published and open for consultation in the near future. It is understood, according to the Irish News, that Minister O’Dowd may wait for both consultation periods to end before making his decision on both development proposals.
There are a number of documents available to assist in your responses:
- Clintyclay ETI Inspection 2010
- Clintyclay Viability Audit 2012
- Public Notice Newspaper May 19
- Clintyclay PS Our School Our Community
Two template letters to assist in your response:
Some things to consider:
The Parish Review which is the foundation on which the proposal to close Clintyclay PS has been built is an error strewn document. While the errors are many, the most obvious pictured opposite was the rationale used to focus the review on Laghey PS and Clintyclay PS only. As you can see in the image right, it is claimed that one of the schools has an ongoing decline in admissions and enrolment, however, the SELB viability audit conducted in the same year as the Parish review shows that both schools had an increasing enrolment over the previous three years with Laghey’s numbers rising by 3% and Clintyclay’s rising by almost 14%. The second and greater falsehood is the claim that Clintyclay had been “deemed to be potentially financially unviable in the February 2012 Viability Audit”. This could not be further from the truth given that the audit actually shows Clintyclay PS had a 2% surplus in its budget at that stage and had been acknowledged as operating within LMS limits (i.e. + or – 5%).
This review recommended that Clintyclay PS should close, an opinion subsequently approved by the diocesan education committee. We argue that these errors should have rendered the review unfit for purpose.
It is worth noting that the CCMS are no longer questioning the school’s financial position and proposing closure for numbers alone. We take this as acceptance that their review was flawed and questo why they are insisting on the closure of Clintyclay PS.
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