“I’m shaving and shaving all the time, and that’s not right. I’m not in this job to be a barber, yet that’s what I’m doing every single day.”
Claire Mac Loughlin is principal of Coláiste Muire Máthair in Galway city, a secondary school of more than 800 students on St Mary’s Road.
The main building, which stands on an elevated site overlooking Galway Bay, was designed by architect William Alphonsus Scott and opened in 1912.
Since then, it has been through many iterations, its most recent being an amalgamation between Our Lady’s College and St Mary’s College.
That amalgamation means it only receives part-Deis status, despite a rising level of disadvantage among its student population.
The school has therefore had to take a loaves-and-fishes approach to keep the doors open and ensure all students are treated the same regardless of their socioeconomic background.
“We have students here whose parents are very well off, and then we have people who are living on the absolute bare minimum,” Mac Loughlin says.
The school uses any money it has to level the playing field for its students. They only get the hot school meals scheme for 250 children, but rather than treat some differently, they reduce the price of food for everyone.
Under the new senior cycle curriculum, students require laptops for some subjects to complete their additional assessment components (AACs). Rather than put families under pressure to buy their own, the school has bought a number of laptops to be shared among everyone. As a consequence, staff do not get a work laptop.
However, as their 100-year-old building begins to crumble around them and the boundary of their financial ingenuity is pushed too far, it begs the question: are we investing enough in our education system?
Coláiste Muire Máthair is a prime example of how so many educational institutions across the country have had to work with relatively little funding while still producing world-class outcomes for the children who attend.
Ireland spends the least on its education system across all OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, yet it continually ranks among the top in the world for educational outcomes.
The latest report of the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings, run by the OECD, found Irish students are first for reading, third for science and fourth for maths out of 27 EU countries.
Such results are even more remarkable given they come against a backdrop of very low State investment by international standards.
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From primary to tertiary education, Ireland spends the least on education as a percentage of its gross domestic product (GDP) compared with all other OECD countries.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at Coláiste Muire Mhaithair, where the roof is literally caving in.
The entire top floor of the building is closed off to students and is being held up with scaffolding.
There are several “crash decks” installed around high-traffic areas on lower floors, and windows are cordoned off in some rooms because the water ingress is so bad it can lead to falling debris.
“That fell down from the ceiling just the other week,” Mac Loughlin says, holding up a tray of concrete shards, some bigger than an A5 notepad, and pieces of steel rebar which would have been used to keep the ceiling together.
“Imagine if that hit you,” she says.
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Squeezing past the scaffolding occupying the staircase leading to the top floor, it is hard to imagine students still using this space until last year.
“Children’s dignity has to be at the core of how we operate. We can’t have the kids in dirty, mouldy spaces,” Mac Loughlin says.
The windows have to stay open to address the dampness in the walls, which means the plaster falls off in chunks.
The school has applied to the Department of Education to have remedial works carried out and is waiting for approval.
A department spokesperson said on Thursday it was actively engaging with the school. It said scaffolding works had been completed, with further remedial works “expected to commence in the coming weeks”.
Separately, the department said, a major building project for the school was progressing and department officials would be in contact with the project manager and the school to schedule a stakeholders meeting.
In the meantime, the principal relies on caretaker Frank Nee, who she says “keeps the wolf from the door”, but also her deputy principal and all of the teaching and administrative staff, as well as the board of management.
“I have a team here that keeps us going through their skills, through their determination. They keep the doors open, and they keep the ceilings up, literally.”
The sharing of laptops between classes also creates its own difficulties, logistically and technically.
There are 24 laptops on a trolley, which must be booked by teachers and rolled between classes.
Students must sign in to each machine every time they use them, find somewhere to charge them and, sometimes, share with a classmate when there are not enough to go around.
While this might be fine for lower classes, it can create real disadvantages for senior cycle students who only get a set amount of time in the year to complete their AACs and are competing with others across the country with far better access to tech.
“People are losing time because they don’t have a laptop, or they’ve had to go across the school trying to find laptops,” sixth-year student Alvin Ngani says of the time drain the sharing creates.
Blanka Klanowska, also a sixth-year student at the school, agrees the practical implications of sharing laptops have real-life consequences.
“If you’re using the laptops two or three times a day in different classes, you have to log in each time, which can take up to 10 minutes each class. That adds up to maybe half an hour overall, which is time wasted and can cause you to fall behind,” Klanowska says.
On a broader point, students believe the increased time looking at screens is a further difficulty of the curriculum reform.
“I feel like we’re going to get overwhelmed by looking at the screen so much. We work on the laptops in school, we might have to work on them at home and then, of course, we’ll also want to have time on our phones as well,” Klanowska says.
“I feel like it’s going to be too much for our eyes, and it might bring us down a good bit, and I feel like we’ll lose a lot of motivation.”
While the sharing arrangements are not ideal, and the efficacy of the new AACs remains up for debate, one thing that is certain is the teachers and leaders of this school are doing all they can to level the playing field.
Standing at the window of the abandoned top-floor room, with dead birds at her feet and plaster in piles on the ground, Mac Loughlin is clear on her vision and that of the school.
“This school is a jewel in the crown of Galway, and we must do everything we can to look after children as far as the eye can see out there,” she says.
“Yet here we are standing in a space that’s not safe. It’s not right. It’s not respectful of our children; it’s not respectful of our community.
“It’s not true to what our mission is, and the mission is the work to care for the children.”