The pressure of budget cuts is having effect as NASS feared. Cumbria proposes to close Captain Shaw’s primary school in Bootle allegedly because it will not be able to balance its budget two years down the line. The proposal is federation with Waberthwaite or closure and children bussed there, and yet Waberthwaite has run four successive deficit years already. This shows the desperation of Councils and the easy excuse of blaming government cuts for wiping out effective small schools.
The severe demand in Euro-strapped Ireland for cuts has produced government proposals to consider major reductions in rural transport with a resulting threat to hundreds of small schools. The Archbishop of Dublin has protested. In Derry major rationalisations threaten many small rural schools - more consequences of the global economic climate squeeze. Why do administrators go for the sector delivering one of the most effective partnerships between home and school ever invented at a time when society despairs at what happens in many larger schools and the significantly reducing currency of school leaving qualifications? The Archbishop is right. We need those models to shape and protect a far more wholesome version of schooling.
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