I used to know an alternative medicine practitioner who swore by her lotions and potions, but at the end of the day, the kindest thing I could have said about her is that she was a world expert on healing ailments that would have cleared up anyway, given time.

And so we come to education, where for a lot of issues, much the same can be said.

In all my years as a teacher and being made to sit bored rigid throughout endless presentations by earnest-faced so-called educationalists, where the most banal and irrelevant aspects of teaching and learning were displayed on colourful charts and insomnia-inducing tables, all this was accompanied by an evangelical narrative that went along the lines that unless you knew the brand of students’ pencils, how on earth could you predict your classes’ exam results?

Of all these issues, one which used to make me smile regularly was the student-teacher ratio – a topic that is so subjective it would take ten times longer to set up the criteria than it would to draw any conclusions.

True, in the grand scheme of things, a teacher who has 30 students will, of course, have less time than one who has 15, but that’s only part of the picture.

What is equally important in the grand scheme of the study or ratios, is that students come and leave schools, as do teachers.

Subject option pools change as do the uptake of students in these subjects’ classes.

Then there’s Sixth Form – a minefield of student numbers if ever there was one. Schools have to offer numerically less popular subjects to get the numbers in the big subjects and then, let’s not forget collaborative learning mechanisms such as Fermanagh Learning Community that kicks in and spoils the party.

For the uninitiated, three blocks per week each for lower and upper Sixths are ‘ring-fenced’ so that schools can offer their less popular subjects to students in other schools, without the need for students to change schools, and to allow small schools to compete on a level playing field.

That’s the theory, anyhow, and what an apposite term; we are all ‘ring-fenced’ in life, just like cattle, while the cowboys run the country.

As for primary schools, they too suffer from the ebb and flow of teacher to pupil ratios, and in small schools, of which there are many in Fermanagh, a small fertility drought in a few townlands could look huge when displayed as raw numbers in a pupil-teacher ratio several years later.

So what is this bigger picture, and how does it affect data?

Firstly, every teacher knows what a ‘good’ class is. They can’t admit it, because in today’s anodyne world, all classes are supposed to be the same, and if there’s a weak one ... well, it’s bound to be the teachers’ fault.

If the blame doesn’t lie at their door, well, it’s got to be somewhere.

That aside, a ‘good’ class is one where there’s a core of well-focused children, with supportive parents, who just get on with their work.

The ratio of homework completed to deadlines is enough to prevent the teacher having to sacrifice their family time to double-mark and, importantly, the more ‘challenging’ children are so few in number that their attempts at disrupting learning remain like the howls of lone wolves crying out in the middle of a frozen forest. If there’s nobody there to hear them, are they crying?

Secondly, child-teacher ratios sometimes can reflect the amount of funding a school has, or should I say, surplus funding.

This has to be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are many, many pockets which educational Fagans can dip into to pay staff, and if the truth be told, some schools are more canny than others.

Finally – and this is especially true of primary schools – the term child-staff (not ‘teacher’) ratio might be more apt.

A good classroom assistant can run the show, working ahead of the teacher to make sure resources are ready, differentiated materials are in neat piles, and all the time-consuming semi-pastoral issues are under control.

This includes parental consent forms, various notes, medical issues, handling money, communications with home, and a great deal many other things.

If teachers had to do this, then there’d be no time for teaching. With this in mind, child-teacher ratios are a bit meaningless on their own.

So what of our local numbers of PTRs? The three Enniskillen grammar schools – Mount Lourdes, Enniskillen Royal Grammar School and St. Michael’s College – have 46.6 full-time equivalent teachers (FTEs), and a student-teacher ratio of 16.07; 58.3 FTEs against 15.69 and 36.6 FTEs giving 19.45 students per teacher, respectively.

The next group – the non-selective post-primary schools that offer post-sixteen study – are St. Fanchea’s and St. Joseph’s Colleges and Devenish College in Enniskillen as well as St. Kevin’s in Lisnaskea.

Of the Enniskillen schools, St. Fanchea’s College has 23.78 FTEs and 13.03 students for every teacher, while its CCMS matching school, St. Joseph’s College, has 21.6 teachers, and a lower ratio of 11.44.

Meanwhile, in Derrycharra, Devenish College has 42.20 FTE teaching staff against a PTR of 14.74, while in Lisnaskea, St. Kevin’s College employs 43.6 FTE teachers for its student-teacher ratio of 15.11.

Neither St. Aidan’s in Derrylin nor St. Mary’s in Irvinestown offer A-Levels, and their PTRs of 15.63 against 15.80 FTEs and 12.1 for 12.4 teachers, respectively, reflect their modest size, where teachers are stretched across many departments.

All figures are for the school year ending in June, 2021. The Department of Education seem to produce their stats just in time for the following year’s school managers to drool over.

What do we learn from this? Well, as explained, there are so many caveats, you have to take a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, but despite what I’ve said here, it still does no harm just to keep an eye on these figures.

After all, we as taxpayers, pay for the number-crunchers to produce this drivel, so we may as well keep them on their toes!