Priorswood Deis Plus school set to lose teacher and face larger class sizes for want of one student

On Wednesday morning, Aileen Plunkett walks the hallways of St Francis Junior School in Priorswood.

Outside, from the yard, the sound of giddy children playing in the sun.

Inside, students, teachers and special needs assistants potter past. Plunkett engages with each child.

“Hello, pet,” she says to one youngster who, Plunkett says, is just learning to talk.

“Hiya, dote,” she says to another, who is sat at a table in a makeshift play area in the corridor, getting some one-on-one maths help from an encouraging teacher.

But sitting in her cosy office – the walls covered with dozens of bright cards, notes and memories – Plunkett says the school is facing a major challenge.

It’s set to lose one of its 10 mainstream class teachers for the upcoming academic year, 2026-2027, Plunkett says.

On 30 September each year, schools must submit the numbers of students they have enrolled for the following school year. Teacher allocations are based on these figures.

On that date, St Francis JS had 165 kids enrolled – just one student shy of the 166 threshold they needed to retain all their current staff.

“We are losing a teacher because we were one pupil short on that magical night of the 30th of September,” she says.

This, despite the fact that St Francis JS was one of just 121 primary and post-primary schools in the country – 63 in Dublin – to be designated Deis Plus this year.

This new scheme is meant to provide enhanced supports to “schools with the highest concentrations of children and young people at risk of educational disadvantage”. 

One of the key measures included in the scheme, for those selected, is “more teachers, more support staff”, the government press release says.

Plunkett has already appealed the decision – with no luck. Now, local residents and TDs are calling on the Department of Education to intervene. 

Social Democrats TD Cian O’Callaghan said the situation is a “very harsh way for departments to be dealing with it”.

Sinn Féin TD Denise Mitchell said the decision “simply flies in the face of Deis Plus’s aims of improving educational outcomes for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

The Department of Education hasn’t replied to a query sent on Monday asking if anything can be done to ensure St Francis Junior School does not lose a vital teacher.

One hand gives, another takes

Minister for Education and Youth Hildegarde Naughton, a Fine Gael TD, said in a March statement announcing the Deis Plus scheme that it is meant, among other things, to provide more teachers to these schools with kids that need more help.

But St Francis JS is looking at losing a teacher, and pushing up its student-teacher ratio from 17:1, which is the Department of Education’s own recommended amount for Deis Plus, to 22:1, says Plunkett, the principal.

That may not seem like a big deal to some other schools, she says, but for a Deis Plus school, it can have a dramatic impact.

The Department of Education’s hands are somewhat tied, though, says Plunkett.

In 2002, the department established the independent Staffing Appeals Board, to “adjudicate on appeals from Boards of Management on mainstream staffing teacher allocation of primary schools”.

Plunkett has already appealed to the board, she says – but her plea was rejected.

Simply, she says, her appeal was based on the fact that they had only missed the threshold by one student, and asked that accommodations be made given the schools Deis Plus status.

She explained in an accompanying letter that their school will always get enrolments up to the beginning of the school term in September, she says.

“Their email says that they are separate from the Department of Education and Youth, and that their decision is final,” she says.

Impacts

Now, the students will suffer, she says – not to mention the extra stress on staff.

The school lost a teacher last year, also, she says, and had to amalgamate three junior infants classes into two senior infants classes.

The impact this has on the progression of the children is undeniable, she says.

To lose another teacher for next year means again amalgamating three junior infants classes into two senior infants classes, and three first classes into two second classes, she says.

“It's going to be at least 22:1 or more in those two classes, along with children in those classes who have complex needs,” she says. “We don't have enough SNAs either.”

“So now we're going to have much bigger class sizes, and yet we have to deal with all of the complex needs,” she says.  

It can take almost all of the year of junior infants for staff, for teachers to figure out who might have a learning disability, she says.

“Who maybe needs to go down the road of an assessment, who may be on the autistic spectrum,” she says. 

“Because many of the children who come to us haven't been to early years, haven't been part of the ECCE [Early Childhood Care and Education] schemes, haven't been involved in anything like that at all,” she says.

The whole idea of Deis Plus is that it's meant to be inclusive and empower children, she says, to help to bridge the gap between those that are from middle-class areas and those that aren't.

“So how can we bridge the gap if now we're going to have much bigger classes?” she says

Some of her staff have told her, she says, that this blow almost negates the good of receiving Deis Plus status.

“It’s disgusting,” says Carol McCarthy, an SNA with the school for over 20 years. 

“What’s worse, is this is a disadvantaged area, this is where the problems are in schools,” she says.

To take a teacher away, over such a small margin, can be so damaging, she says. “Bigger numbers, bigger problems.”

Community

St Francis Junior School is at the heart of the Dublin 17 community, and the education and support it offers to pupils and families are a source of pride, says Mitchell, the Sinn Féin TD.

The reason this school is part of the Deis Plus scheme is because some pupils come from quite disadvantaged backgrounds, she says.

It is also a school with a significant proportion of students from a Traveller background, she says – around 40 percent, says Plunkett, the principal.

Whether it loses a teacher next year or not, though, she says, the school and community will make it work somehow.

Sitting behind her desk, she recalls a challenge a few years ago that arose seemingly from nowhere.

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the first wave of Ukrainian refugees arrived in Ireland, a staff member knocked on her office door to tell her there was a crowd outside.

There were around 40 Ukrainians there, asking if she would take their children on and educate them.

She had no Ukrainian or Russian, and they had very little English, she says. But one of them spoke Spanish, they figured out.

Plunkett arranged for them to come back the next day and asked her son, fluent in Spanish, to translate.

The school agreed to accept the children, and offer the parents whatever support they could.

“It was just amazing, what went on in this school, like it was just mad,” she says.

“We had about 45 Ukrainian children here,” she says, “and it took the government a long time then to get the supports in place.”

The kindness that the local community showed those families was incredible, she says.

Now, potentially with a fresh challenge on their hands, says Plunkett, they’ll get through it together.

What now?

The decision by the Staffing Appeals Board from the must be revisited and reversed, says Mitchell, the Sinn Féin TD.

“I wrote to Education Minister Naughton last week outlining my serious concerns that the impact of removing a mainstream teacher would have on pupils, and asking her to personally re-examine this decision,” she says.

Minister Naughton assured Mitchell that she is looking into the matter, she says.

“I hope she takes onboard the concerns of teachers, students, local elected representatives and the broader community and stops this counterproductive cut from going ahead,” she says.

Despite pledging to reduce primary school class sizes in the Programme for Government, says Mitchell, there has so far been no reduction.

“And, as this decision shows, in some schools the trend is going in the opposite direction, which is unacceptable,” she says.

O’Callaghan has been looking for answers too, he says. Beyond this one school, though, O’Callaghan also suggests the system might need to change.

Especially in the case of Deis and Deis Plus schools, the Department of Education needs to find ways to allow more flexibility, he says. 

“Maybe making changes over, you know, long-term trends, rather than dropping a student, and in one year resulting in a teacher being gone,” he says.

Plunkett says the school can appeal one more time to the Staffing Appeals Board in June, but she isn’t confident that the response there will be much different, she says.

A petition was launched four days ago, on behalf of the school, on Change.org. By 26 May, it had almost 700 signatures.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.