CEIST: the first 10 years of a lay Catholic educational trust in Ireland

Abstract

In the first half of 2007, Catholic Education an Irish Schools Trust (CEIST) was established when several Religious Congregations handed trusteeship of their schools to a lay company. As CEIST – in the Irish language the word ‘CEIST’ means ‘question’ – completes 10 years serving the needs of its 110 secondary schools, it seems an appropriate time to take a retrospective and a prospective look at that experience and the questions it raises.

Keywords:

• second-level schools
• Education Trustees
• proactive trusteeship
• lay Trusts

Notes on contributor

Marie (Donnellan) Griffin, PhD, is CEO of CEIST since 2014. Previously a Principal in both a Catholic girls’ second-level school and a State co-educational school in an area of designated disadvantage, Dr Griffin also worked as Education Officer and Acting CEO for a regional state education organisation.

Notes

1. ‘There is no solid basis for believing that the continuation of Catholic education depends on the direct involvement of the religious. The provision of Catholic schools is, in fact, a responsibility of the whole Catholic community’ (Sr Theresa McCormack, Conference of the Religious of Ireland, 2000)

2. The terms ‘trusteeship’ and ‘patronage’ are now used interchangeably at second-level.

3. Ethos is understood as a dynamic concept arising out of dialogue involving all the school partners, between the core values of the school and the daily practice which endeavours to embody those values (Irish Commission for Justice and Peace 1993).

4. The Articles of Management for Catholic Secondary Schools (1985) are based on an agreement between the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland, and the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools and govern the establishment and operation of boards of management in AMCSS affiliated schools. Recognised legally in the Education Act 1998.

5. Boards of management, involving lay people for the first time in the management of second-level schools, were introduced into Ireland in the 1980s. Boards of Management of Catholic second-level schools are made up of eight volunteers; four appointed by the Trustees (including the Chairperson) and two each nominated by the parents and teachers of the school, all to be appointed formally by the Trustees. The Trustees, therefore, have an effective majority on each school Board.

6. The religious congregations established Education Offices that worked on a regional basis to ensure the operation of the Trustee function for their respective schools. Trustees are also involved by the inspectorate in the consultation processes for whole school evaluations in schools.

7. CORI (The Conference of Religious of Ireland), established in 1960, had a combined membership of approximately 9000 from 138 Religious Congregations.

8. ‘We had a vision that there would be a body established in Irish law and in church law to whom we would hand over the enterprise of education and carry on the spirit and ethos’ (Founding Director of CEIST, McGuinness Review, 2011)

9.

We have spent ten years preparing for this day. Our Founders, both lay and religious, were driven by their faith and the needs of their time to provide education, based on our Gospel values. Our faith-based education mission will continue to shine through CEIST with the support of our lay colleagues.(Sr Elizabeth Mazwell, PVM, on behalf of the Founding Congregations, Press Release, June 13th, 2007)

10. Some Religious Congregations established lay Trusts for a single Congregation e.g. the Edmund Rice Schools’ Trust was established by the Christian Brothers. The Presentation Brothers also established a Trust for their schools as did the Loreto Order. Others joined Le Cheile, a Trust made up of 14 smaller Congregations while other Congregations opted to join with their sister congregational schools across Europe as entities.

11. The organisational structure originally envisaged for CEIST in 2007, particularly in relation to staffing levels, was somewhat over-ambitious. At the same time, property prices were affected by the economic downturn and did not return expected yields for EDUCENA, as a funder to CEIST. In 2011, the McGuinness Review of the organisation took place and the organisation was downsized to current levels (there are eight people working as part of the CEIST Executive in 2016).

12.

In approaching the task of theorising Irish educational change from the perspective of the cultural reconstruction of the institution of education, it seemed productive to view the span of development since the 1950s … in terms of a transition from an institution that had God at its centre to one in which trade/exchange is at its core. In labelling these as theocentric and mercantile respectively … they were found to have the potential to not alone illuminate what is suggested by the nature of dualism but, more importantly, for accommodating themes raised in previous treatments of Irish education by way of their paradigmatic and textual relationships. (O’Sullivan 2005, 104).

13. In 2017, CEIST is still made up of the five founding Congregations – the Mercy Sisters, Sisters of the Christian Retreat, Daughters of Charity, Presentation Sisters and Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.

14. The Action Plan for Education by the Department of Education and Skills (2017) sets out the goal of providing greater school choice. This involves accelerating the provision of multi- and nondenominational schools. An open consultation was established by the Department of Education and Skills on schools’ admissions policies ‘The role of denominational religion in the school admissions process and possible approaches for making changes’. There is a perceived threat to maintaining religion as one criterion for entry to faith-based schools. There is also consultation taking place at primary school level about the place of, and time for, religious education.