The Post-Primary Education Forum (PPEF)
The PPEF is a National alliance of educational interests. The partners represented at the Forum are ACCS, IVEA, JMB, TUI, ASTI and NPCpp. ACCS was pleased to become part of what has been described elsewhere as an historic collaboration otherwise known as the Post-Primary Education Forum, adding the acronym PPEF to our already extensive list. As partners in Education we often find ourselves voicing the same concerns, if from different viewpoints and this forum provides us with the opportunity to join our voices together to amplify our needs and call for the funding required to meet these common needs.
Paul Beddy and Jim Moore from the NCPpp outlined their thoughts on the forum as follows: “Our view is that there are many important educational issues that are common, and that a shared and united approach would enhance the quality of information which we can make available to parents, while at the same time fostering a ‘knowledge based' understanding of our teacher and management partners and their perspectives on issues. Underpinning our education system is the level of investment undertaken by the State, and this is the most important issue of concern to everyone involved in education. Unprecedented economic growth has witnessed increases in educational spending, but the allocation of funds is well short of our expectations. We would see this forum as having the dual role of (a) supporting the Minister's efforts to increase the overall budgetary allocation to education and (b) highlighting priorities in education.”
Jim Moore – Director of the National Parents', post-primary outlined the rationale behind the PPEF in his address to the press on November 12th 2007, as follows:
“Good afternoon ladies & gentlemen, and welcome to the official launch of the Post Primary Education Forum.
The formation of this group, comprised of management, teacher, and parent representative groups, represents a very significant development in Secondary Education in our country.
The Irish Education system is underpinned by our Constitution and legislation. The Education Act 1998 proclaims inter alia the need to…..“ensure that the education system is accountable to students, their parents and the State………and is conducted in a spirit of partnership…….”
This Post Primary Education Forum is an expression of these principles.
The original concept for setting out to form this grouping was the motivation of the Directors of the NPCpp to seek a greater involvement for parent bodies in the Secondary system. As an organisation made up entirely of voluntary efforts, we needed to establish a greater co-operation with our partners on several levels in order to be able to effect change and to be effective in our representative role on the national stage.
Within education, all organisations (and backed up by research across many countries) can attest to the need for adequate involvement in the secondary system. What has limited our effectiveness has been our inability to express diverse views within a structure that has very limited funding. We are happy that the department has recognised the need to fund the parents' role in a meaningful way, and we acknowledge the role that all our partners here have played in endorsing this need.
The Post Primary Education Forum represents a unique opportunity in secondary education for a shared approach to understanding first and highlighting second, common issues which require a concerted effort to focus them on the national stage. Within our respective organisations, we set about preparing representations to the department that effectively ‘speak the same language', but we never present them together in a common language and message.
Here today, our common language relates to the question of overall funding in education. How can it be, during times of unprecedented economic development, that the department of finance has not been able to maintain its allocation to education as a percentage of GDP? Whilst we acknowledge that spending on education has increased over the last decade, the proportion of our wealth that we spend on education has fallen from 5.2% in 1995 to 4.8% today. Government failure to provide ‘correct' funding, we find that the department of education is incapable of addressing
- Meaningful improvements in the Pupil Teacher Ratio so as to reduce class sizes, thereby improving the educational changes of our students.
- Adequate development of a properly resourced national ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) Strategy.
- Sufficient resources and support for the involvement of students with Special Educational needs in mainstream second-level schools before the final roll-out of the EPNS Act
- Improvements in the allocation to schools for learning support as distinct from resource teaching.
- A realistic budget for ICT (Information & Computer Technology) in schools to be included in the National Development Plan. This budget must include provision for the training of all teachers in the use of ICT in the classrooms
- An ongoing review of schemes to deal with disadvantage and in particular the introduction of a dispersed scheme for combating educational disadvantage.
- The resource necessary for an implementation strategy to tackle behavioral problems in education.”
ACCS is please to be associated with the PPEF and looks forward to future collaboration for the good of all involved in education. This forum has recently had a new impetus when it came together to fight the Education Cuts announced in the Budget 2009 by Minister for Education & Science, Mr. Batt O'Keeffe.