Posted online: Aug 22nd, 2008

By Dermot Keys
dermto@letterkennypost.com

The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) in Donegal has lambasted Fine Gael’s education spokesman Brian Hayes’ for his controversial proposal to segregate immigrant children in schools until they have learnt English.
Mr Hayes remained defiant this week in the face of opposition from academics, teachers’ organisations and immigrant groups. While he admitted regret at the use of the word “segregation,” he maintained that children should be taught in separate classrooms until they had attained full fluency.
This view was rejected by Donegal’s INTO representative, Gerard McGeehan, who told the Letterkenny Post that schools should maintain their current policy of integration.
“We spent years integrating children with special needs and to turn around now and take a different approach for foreign nationals would be crazy,” he said.
“It wouldn’t make any sense. We know that they need specialist help and if anything they need more help not segregation.”
He added that the current system was working and any attempt to bring about isolate children in separate classrooms would be counter-productive.
“At the INTO we believe that students should all be taught together and that there should be no segregation. Immigrant children should be integrated into the classroom. We are in full agreement with the system as it is set up at the moment. We’ve been operating this system for a few years now and find that it is operating quite well.”
He said that any issues with fluency should be addressed on an individual basis, with additional one-to-one language skills teaching available. He praised the efforts of immigrant children in overcoming any linguistic deficit.
“We’ve always found that they are very anxious to learn in general. These students tend to be very quick to learn in our experience.”