Educational cuts feared

Press, 8 June 1979, Page 3

Educational cuts feared

PA Wellington, The Educational Institute fears the Planning Council’s) education proposals could be used by the Government as justification for drastic Budget cuts in education. In a report this week, the council details education, health, and social welfare recommendations for the 1980 s.

i reduce teacher-training inTakes. ) “The institute commends I the council’s acceptance of the recruitment, training, retraining and additional staffing programmes it considered necessary to deal with special educational and social needs of children. But it fails to understand how the council overlooked the urgent requirement to expand the psychological and visiting teacher services whose activities are so vital to the welfare of many children in our schools,” the spokesman said. It was a “sad fact” that a high number of serious cases referred to the psychological service had to wait up to a year for treatment because the service staffing was so restricted.

The institute is one of several teacher bodies to question why a long-awaited teacher-training review, believed to contain staffing improvement proposals, has not yet appeared. Asserting that several of the education proposals were contradictory, a spokesman for the institute gave as examples of the council’s acknowledgement of the need for extra staff to deal with the special needs of children, and the proposal to

The economic bias of the council’s report, based on demographic predictions of doubtful accuracy, was immediately obvious. The report failed to indicate the council’s awareness of the school’s present serious staffing difficulties.

The institute attributed the staff shortage, with some education boards employing untrained teachers, to the Government’s “ill-advised” decision to cut teacher college quotas from 1976.

The institute warned that classes without teachers were a very real possibility during the rest of the year, while further restrictions would seriously disadvantage children in the future.

The council’s proposal to reduce teacher-trainee allowances failed to acknowledge the special character of teacher-training which required a personal commitment to complete a professional training programme which had limited application outside education. “It is vitally important to our children that the Government and parents realise that education cuts never heal,” the spokesman said.