ATL

Northern Ireland

With specialist schools in the news, director of ATL Northern Ireland Mark Langahmmer takes a closer look

The recent critical Irish News coverage of the performance of specialist schools has brought welcome scrutiny of this programme. Several of our members have praised the effects of the programme in their schools and are, understandably, proud to have secured specialist status. The downside of specialist schools, however, is rarely aired.

Specialist schools enjoy significant financial benefit, with a recurrent grant of up to £75,000 on top of a flat-rate annual grant of £100 per pupil. This imbalance in funding will drive parents to favour well-resourced schools, while poorly resourced ones will fall further behind.

Specialist schools require £25,000 in unconditional private-sector sponsorship. Poor schools in disadvantaged areas will always struggle to raise this cash. But how many private-sector companies donate £25,000 unconditionally? Is this really a free lunch? I doubt it.

Another concern is that onerous bidding wars between schools waste time. Teachers already complain about initiative fatigue, but are obliged to rejig their schemes of work to fit in the specialism. They are diverted from front-line teaching to contributing to bidding processes and, if successful, preparing monitoring returns.

The bottom line is that the specialist schools programme was conceived as part of a wider ideological drive to marketise education - part of the contestability dogma which, consciously or not, promotes a dog-eat-dog, sink-or-swim culture of inter-school rivalry that we can ill afford.