An exploration of the experiences and understandings of stakeholders in a newly reconfigured community national school in Ireland: a case study

With the establishment of a formal primary education system in Ireland in 1831, came the gradual establishment of the ‘patronage system’. By 1900, Ireland’s primary education system was largely managed by denominational patrons, the majority of whom were Catholic (Walsh, 2016). In the decades that followed, the denominational nature of the patronage system remained largely unchallenged and unproblematic for the majority of the population who identified as Roman Catholic. However, since the Educate Together movement of the 1970s, there have been calls for change to the denominational status quo of primary education. Ireland is increasingly religiously diverse, with an increasing percentage of the population identifying as being non-religious. This has put pressure on the primary education system to respond to the needs of a more diverse society and provide choice for families who do not want their children to attend denominational schools. The response to this challenge, which was proposed during the ‘Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector’ in 2011 and which has been supported by successive governments since then, has been school reconfiguration, previously known as ‘school divestment’. This Department of Education policy supports schools who are denominational to transfer patronage to a multidenominational model, thereby increasing the level of school choice available to parents. Successive governments have aimed to have 400 multi-denominational schools reconfigured by 2030, but progress in this area has been very slow and divisive. Taking a qualitative case study approach, this study explored the lived experience of stakeholders in one newly reconfigured school, which changed from a Catholic primary school to a multidenominational Community National School. The findings offer insight into the concepts of ethos, school choice and identity, which were identified as central to the processes of reconfiguration being explored in this research. The findin