After the launch of the preliminary results of the national primary school survey, a phrase of a song that I couldn’t identify kept repeating itself in my head. Eventually, I realised it was a line from Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”

If the results of the survey are accurate, a surprising number of parents and guardians seem to like what they have got just fine and have no desire to see it gone. Sixty per cent of parents are happy with denominational education.

About 40 per cent of households with children under 12 completed the survey – a perfectly respectable response. However, we cannot extrapolate much from the figures regarding patronage because we don’t know how the other 60 per cent would have voted.

Reports on individual schools are due to be published in May. Only a foolhardy person would predict how many schools will be divested as a result.

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Although the 2022 Census reported some 14 per cent of the population as having no religion and a further 3,823........

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