Time to end this divisive debate on private education

Parents who send their children to Belvedere College are taxpayers. That they then spend more on their child's education is their right, argues GERRY FOLEY, the headmaster of the Dublin school

ALL PARENTS SHARE a desire to give their child the best education possible. I can speak only of my experience at Belvedere College SJ, and the reality here is very different to the stereotype of fee-paying schools.

I have worked in both voluntary secondary and community schools in Ireland and in several disadvantaged schools in London. My parents sent me to the Christian Brothers in Tralee (not a rugby ball or a fee in sight), but it wasn’t my local school. I had to cycle six kilometres every morning to catch the bus to school every day. In choosing that school, my parents did what they thought was best. Every parent makes these choices, and in doing so they tap into the deeply held aspirations we all have for our children.

Fee-paying schools in Ireland are often castigated for taking funds from the State at a time when more essential services provided in education are being cut back. Let me put that argument to bed quickly: the State has to pay teachers for every child. The fee-paying sector saves the State more than €90 million – circa €3,500 per student – annually. The State does not pay for the buildings or maintenance at Belvedere, and it doesn’t pay the capitation grants given to non-fee schools.

In short, a child who attends a non-fee school costs the State about €8,000 a year. The cost to the State of a child at Belvedere is about €4,500. Parents, who are taxpayers, make up the rest. On a purely financial basis the State’s support of fee-paying schools is an excellent example of public-private partnership.

These facts are extremely important, particularly when it is suggested that cutting the number of teachers in fee-paying schools and changing the pupil-teacher ratio will save the State money. The opposite is the case. Fee-paying schools will have to increase fees to employ needed teachers. Parents who can’t afford the increase will send their children to non-fee schools and the State will have to pay the teachers and cover the additional costs of education previously borne by the parents through the fees they paid.

Parents who send their child to Belvedere are taxpayers. They are entitled to free postprimary education for their children. That they pay tax and then spend more of their income on their child’s education is their right. In a liberal state people can spend their income as they see fit: on private healthcare, on grinds, on music lessons, on Irish college.

These are things that parents think will benefit their children, yet I don't think anyone has been criticised for sending their child to the Gaeltacht or to piano lessons. Why are they criticised for some choices and not others? Is the argument that because some parents can't afford school fees, or music lessons, or sports equipment, no child should enjoy such outlay? Safeguarding parental choice and preventing a monopoly in terms of school provision, either by the Church or the State, is strongly supported by the OECD report Education at a Glance, 2010.As Dr Don Thornhill – former secretary general of the Department of Education and Science, chairman of the Higher Education Authority, chairman of the National Competitiveness Council of Ireland – states: "The availability of choice for students and parents is a powerful stimulus for improving the quality of school and educational outcomes. It is also necessary to ensure that the school system caters for different needs, choices and aptitudes."

My own experience has been that where parents have the right to choose their school, standards rise, provided the focus is more on the quality of teaching and learning and less on bureaucracy. Preventing parents from doing the best they can is not the answer. Instead, we should try to ensure that all children are given the best educational opportunities.

Doing this requires addressing social inequality and inequality in educational achievement between children from different social backgrounds. That, in turn, requires a multifaceted approach. Fee schools make up only 6 per cent of all second-level schools in the State. A narrow focus on removing the limited support that those small number of fee schools receive will do nothing to address the issue. Money alone is not the answer, as educational researchers have found across the water.

Dr Thornhill suggests a constructive approach: “Rather than trying to focus on a policy of reducing all schools to the same level, can we stimulate some of the features of excellence which we find in fee schools and stimulate some of the features of excellence in nonfee-paying schools to produce some strands of improved education performance which benefit the whole system?”

The current divisive approach of pitting fee-paying against nonfee-paying schools will not improve education as a whole, for all our children. As with most parents, ours have already been badly hit by cutbacks and are increasingly struggling with fees. The tipping point for many of them has been reached. In the future more parents will not be able to pay school fees, and this will result in further increased costs to the State.

A further criticism levelled at fee-paying schools is that they are elitist. At Belvedere, 10 per cent of our students have special needs and receive resource hours. Another 10 per cent of our intake come from socially deprived backgrounds. They are given a bursary that covers all their schooling costs. It’s not a scholarship, because the award depends solely on social and financial need. This social-diversity programme is part of our wider social-justice programme, which is largely rooted in our local inner-city community. Our students visit the homeless and the elderly there, teach English to refugees and give peer tutoring in local primary schools.

We have no entrance exam or interview. The admission policy for Belvedere College is on our website.The trustees, the board of management and the parents’ association review the policy annually and are committed to fairness and transparency. The department’s review of admission policies in nonfee-paying schools found that a minority of those schools practise some form of cherry-picking. Given that fee schools were precluded from that review, it’s unfair to blame them for a problem identified in nonfee schools. We all need to strive to give every child in our country the best possible education, particularly in the current time. I make no apology for the excellence achieved at Belvedere College.

Fee-paying schools exist and parents make sacrifices to send their children to them. People paying €4,900 a year are not the superwealthy. Are parents who pay up to €900 a month in creche fees among the super-rich?

Fee-paying schools represent a small section and should not be used as a vehicle for diverting attention away from the much bigger issues in Irish education – issues that must be tackled for the good of the whole society.