One year on: How co-education transformed Westport’s secondary schools

Last September marked the first time that Westport and Louisburgh had three schools offering co-education simultaneously ― a shift that has reshaped how, and where, local families choose to educate their children.

Rice College was left oversubscribed, while Sacred Heart School and Sancta Maria College were able to offer places to everyone who applied.

As reported at the time in The Mayo News, the uncertainty created huge stress for the families of those on the waiting list for Rice College.

A year on, the ripple effects of that change are still being worked out in enrolment offices, staff rooms and building plans across the town for the 288 students expected across the catchment area ― slightly down on last year’s 294.

A cap on places

At Rice College, Principal Michael Rabbette is candid about just how tight the squeeze became. With 294 students in the catchment area, the school received 224 applications.

“The Department of Education wanted us to cut our numbers at 100,” Rabbette tells The Mayo News. “They didn’t want any more than 100 coming in. Why? I can’t understand it. We at the board wouldn’t cooperate with them and insisted that we go to 144, six classes, because we felt we were able to accommodate that and we felt that it was just and on half that we were entitled to our fair share of the students that were out there.”

The Department of Education told The Mayo News that its priority is to ensure that “existing capacity is optimised and managed sustainably. This approach helps avoid the unsustainable expansion of one school at the expense of another.”

It also noted that there are sufficient places available across the two schools to accommodate all children seeking first-year places in the town.

If there was no cap placed on Rice College for this year, the principal says that the school could have taken in an extra class of students and matched the 168 places on offer the year before.

The board’s decision to hold the line at 144 rather than 100 left roughly 80 students on a waiting list ― and a wave of phone calls and representations from disappointed parents followed.

Five families lodged successful Section 29 appeals, each hinging on the school’s Category D admissions rule, which prioritised children of past pupils but was found to have been applied inconsistently: Rice College had admitted 48 students under that category against a legal limit of 36.

“There were females in the community that said I was discriminating against them,” Rabbette says, “but I couldn’t possibly be, because it was ‘parents’ that was the word that was used.”

To avoid a repeat, the board has now scrapped Category D from its admissions criteria entirely. The simplified list for the coming year reads: current siblings, past siblings, current staff, and feeder schools.

The maths for the year ahead is unforgiving in a different way: while the school intends to hold its intake at 144, only around 60 students are due to leave at the other end, piling pressure on classroom space that is managed, Rabbette says, through careful timetabling rather than any immediate building expansion ― though a second phase of development, adding engineering, home economics and music rooms and widening corridors, is in train.

Open and taster days for prospective students run on Monday, September 28 and Tuesday, September 29, with around 144 students attending on each day, followed by a parents’ open night on Wednesday, September 30 from 7pm to 9pm. The formal three-week enrolment window opens on Friday, October 2 and closes on Friday, October 23, ahead of the mid-term break.

Sacred Heart in transition

Next door, Sacred Heart School has taken a quieter but no less significant step into co-education, admitting 77 first years this year, 16 of them boys. Acting principal Kevin Malone says the transition has gone smoothly.

“You have all these students who are used to their primary schools coming into a secondary school ― different space, different connections, and all the rest,” Malone says. “They’ve settled in very well. The boys are very organised. We’ve got two year heads supporting them, which has been fantastic ... considering they’re moving between classrooms, practical rooms, following a timetable, operating lockers. There’s always going to be a bit of teething, but the boys have been fantastic, and they bring their own energy.”

Behind the scenes, the school is managing a more complex logistical shift: junior students are due to move to the Altamont Street campus, when it opens before November, while senior students and most practical subjects ― the kitchen, art rooms, technology room and the school’s single science lab ― remain on the current site.

The pathway connecting the two sites, via Mill Lane, is still being upgraded and a CCTV camera system is already installed on the pathway. “We just need to get it finished to make sure we’re happy with it, because it is a significant move for us,” Malone says. “We want everything working.”

Longer term, Sacred Heart’s new school building has moved to what the Board of Management calls Stage 2A of the Department’s process ― the detailed design and planning phase ― with the board describing it as “notoriously difficult to progress beyond Stage 1” and framing the move as a strong signal of departmental support. A phased demolition and rebuild is projected for completion by 2030.

The urgent need for the new campus is exemplified by the lack of sports facilities and canteen currently on site. Sacred Heart will tour local primary schools at the start of next month, with an open night for prospective parents scheduled for October 13.

Malone attributes much of the school’s draw to its ethos rather than the novelty of co-education alone. “What attracts people to our school is our approach and our ethos and how we genuinely care for our students,” he says, pointing to newer subject offerings including applied technology, graphics, and DCG (Design, Communication Graphics) at Leaving Certificate level.

Amalgamation ‘never on the cards’

The idea of the two neighbouring Westport schools, whose campuses are right next door to one another, eventually merging has surfaced periodically ― most recently voiced publicly by Cllr Peter Flynn at a civic reception in May.

“We have two fantastic schools in Westport ... it’s really important that the two of them are working as one, that we’re sharing facilities, sharing resources, sharing knowledge,” Flynn said, framing it as an appeal to the wider community rather than a formal proposal.

Rice College’s Rabette is measured on the subject, noting any such move would sit at patron level rather than being a school-level decision. “It was never on the cards here under any discussion,” he says, drawing a contrast with Claremorris, where falling numbers have put amalgamation on the table. “We were two viable schools ... it never came up. The way this came at us was the Co-ed for Westport Group. We were meeting the demand at the time, and we felt we were doing the right thing.”

Sacred Heart’s Malone notes that any discussion on the topic would be at “patron level” and “don’t happen locally on that between the schools.”

Bus to Sancta Maria

A steady stream of Westport students has long looked further afield, to Sancta Maria College in Louisburgh ― historically around 15 percent of the town’s secondary-school population, a figure that has held constant even as Rice College and Sacred Heart went co-ed. Some students travel from as far as Balla.

Rice College Principal Rabbette is blunt about the cost of that commute. “It’s an unsustainable means of travel, and the expense of it ― it’s eight, nine hundred euro. It’s a lot of money,” he says. “I’m hoping that will change now that Sacred Heart is Co-ed. I firmly believe that students from their own hinterland should attend the local school.”

Sancta Maria’s Principal, Dr Áine Moran, rejects the suggestion that families have chosen the school primarily because it offered co-education before the Westport schools did. She points instead to the “excellent teaching and learning, excellent well-being” recently validated by a Department of Education inspection, noting the school has been asked to produce a video for the Department showcasing its approach to student wellbeing.

“It’s a market leader in terms of looking after young people, the wide range of subjects that we offer, facilities that we have, our care of the numbers that we take,” Dr Moran says. “We always front-load the accessing of further accommodation before we take in more students, so that everybody has access to specialist rooms. Parents take all those things into account ― it’s much more multifaceted than that, and it is a choice that parents make.”

A year into the co-education era, Westport’s second-level landscape looks markedly different from the one families navigated before.

With Rice College’s admissions window opening on October 2, Sacred Heart’s open night following on October 13 and Sancta Maria to announce their admission timetable soon, this year’s crop of prospective first years ― and their parents ― are about to find out just how much has changed.

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