CEO Blog
Behind the Scenes at Local Election Count in RDS
- 11/06/2014
I found it hard to drag myself off the sofa and wander down to the polling station. I was definitely going to vote but had let a couple of hours slip by dozing and flicking channels and now it all seemed such a chore. As I handed over the card it had taken me a good 5 minutes to locate, I was vaguely aware of a man in his 40s, most probably from an Indian or South East Asian background, asking...
Is ‘multi-denominational’ an ethos?
- 07/04/2014
Fr Michael Drumm is right - there is a lot of confusion in the language around school ethos and religion in Ireland (The Irish Catholic, Thursday April 3rd). How are parents supposed to know what ‘multi-denominational’ means, when it means different things in different schools? What does any school mean by ‘religious education’? And so on. A word of wisdom passed on to me when I started working...
Belief Systems - the toughest strand to get right?
- 03/04/2014
Educate Together's ethical education curriculum at primary level is, of course, the Learn Together with its four strands: Moral and Spiritual, Equality and Justice, Belief Systems and Ethics and the Environment. Belief Systems addresses the main world religions: Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism and Buddhism. Of all four strands, it’s probably the hardest to get right and certainly...
Stand Up! Awareness Week against Homophobic & Transphobic Bullying: March 2014
- 12/02/2014
Advance Notice! Stand Up! Awareness Week against Homophobic & Transphobic Bullying 10th – 14th March 2014 Don’t Stand for Homophobic or Transphobic Bullying! We’re delighted to announce the dates for BeLonGTo’s next national Stand Up! Awareness Week: 10th – 14th March 2014. Stand Up! is funded by the Department of Education and endorsed by education partners such as Educate Together to tackle...
LGBT Teachers in Educate Together Schools
- 12/02/2014
As the storms crash in, all kinds of issues are tumbling around. Uniforms in schools, Union resistance to reforms, outlandish claims aimed at suppressing free speech about homophobia, and now the rights of LGBT teachers in Irish schools. Where to start? Today for one. The Irish Times says that Irish schools are failing LGBT teachers. Well, in Educate Together schools we do not discriminate...
Addressing LGBT Issues in School
- 27/01/2014
In this month’s issue of Teacher News, Hilary Mc Loughlin, from Kildare ETNS, writes a really interesting article about how to deal with LGBT issues at primary level. This is an area we’ve been attempting to tackle for some time now. Educate Together has run two summer courses for teachers, in association with BeLonGTo, on Addressing Homophobia in Schools and there are a number of sections...
Educate Together Scientists of Tomorrow!
- 10/01/2014
Young scientists from the laboratories and classrooms of four Educate Together schools are making an impact at the 2014 RDS Primary Science Fair this week! The fair, which is part of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition , aims to encourage and facilitate primary school aged children across the island of Ireland to develop a long term interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering...
A History of Ireland in 100 Objects
- 10/12/2013
Lessons on Selected Objects from: A History of Ireland in 100 Objects Almost two years ago, I opened The Irish Times, one lazy Saturday afternoon, and found myself looking a picture of a headless horseman. It wasn’t a particularly scary headless horseman. Much more an accidental one. It was as if the rider’s head had left its body in a moment of absentmindedness. The picture was actually of...
Ethos Conference 2013
- 03/12/2013
Three of us were involved in organising this year's Ethos Conference on Nov 23rd. Three is a nice number - small enough for genuine discussion when arrangements get going and big enough to spread the blame around when things haven't gone to plan. Organising events like this tap into something deeply primeval. What if nobody comes? What if it's just the three of us and a pile of rapidly depleting...
Educate Together: We don't teach atheism, we teach about atheism
- 07/11/2013
I was travelling in the UK last month and came back to quite a furore about an article in the Guardian newspaper and on the Guardian website. The writer had asserted that Educate Together had "won the right" to teach "that God doesn't exist" in Ireland! In the end the paper printed a correction and published a letter I wrote to the editor but not before social media sites had echoed with quite a...