The Department of Education and Youth (DEY) has announced plans - as part of the new Education (Student and Parent Charter) Bill – for a new statutory charter that will require schools to reveal exactly how their voluntary contributions are being spent.
So despite Ireland’s persistent underfunding of post-primary education, the Minister for Education and Youth, Hildegarde Naughton, has chosen not to address the funding deficit, but to police how schools explain the consequences of that deficit to parents. This is the very essence of governance by distraction – never mind that it is insulting to schools already operating at breaking point.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report Education at a Glance 2025, published last September, showed once again that Ireland is at the bottom of an international league table for government expenditure on second-level education as a proportion of GDP.
In 2022, the year analysed in the OECD report, Ireland invested 0.8 per cent of its GDP in second-level education, compared to OECD and EU averages of 1.7 per cent.
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Ireland has remained at the bottom of the list of OECD countries for this indicator for many years.
[ Schools seeking ‘voluntary contributions’ of up to €350 from parentsOpens in new window ]
Let us be absolutely clear. Schools do not ask parents for voluntary contributions because of extravagance or mismanagement. They do so because the State has abdicated its responsibility to adequately fund the basic functioning of its own education system.
It is worth noting that the constitutional provision for free education refers to primary level only, not secondary. (This does not matter in practice to schools because both sectors are dealing with similar challenges.)
The notion that schools in this country are adequately funded by the State, repeatedly perpetuated by successive ministers for education, is nonsense. The reality is that many schools are dependent on voluntary contributions, annual fundraisers and financial support from sources such as Past Pupils Unions to assist with costs. All of this, by the way, exacerbates the national divide between schools that have and have not, because of the affluence and fundraising power of some schools compared to others.
Despite what the DEY think, voluntary contributions and annual fundraisers are not vanity projects. They are survival mechanisms. They pay for heating in winter, year-round lighting, classroom consumables, buses, extra-curricular activities, cleaning, insurance and countless hidden costs that have spiralled exponentially in recent years.
[ Cost of starting secondary school in Ireland now tops €1,100Opens in new window ]
The suggestion (implicit or otherwise) that schools are sitting on piles of parental cash for frivolous projects is deeply offensive. Schools are not building €335,000 bicycle sheds or €1.4 million security huts. They are patching up leaky roofs, keeping outdated boilers alive and trying to ensure that students can learn in buildings that are safe, warm and fit for purpose.
Refurbishments, new buildings and/or extensions are being denied. For example, over the past number of years, all over the country, hundreds of school principals have stood up at open nights in their schools, year after year, speaking in good faith about promised improvements, extensions and new builds in their schools. They have regularly outlined incremental developments, illustrated drawings and unveiled architectural models of these exciting developments.
Laying the blame at the door of schools which ask for voluntary contributions is becoming tiresome. For many schools, the need for voluntary contributions is simple: they are not receiving enough funding to meet their day-to-day expenses
However, only last week the rug was pulled from under many of them when they learned (mostly via media reports) that their long-awaited projects have now been stalled or quietly shelved. These principals have been hung out to dry and are left to manage disappointment, anger and reputational damage through no fault of their own, while students continue to learn in substandard facilities.
The irony is that these same principals are now to be burdened with additional statutory reporting obligations, as if transparency were the core problem.
The situation is even more stark for voluntary secondary schools which because of their history are more likely to be in older buildings and which receive a significantly lower proportion of their funding from the State – and are therefore far more reliant on voluntary contributions. This structural inequity is well-known, long-acknowledged and consistently ignored. To impose further requirements of accountability on these schools without addressing the underlying funding imbalance is not reform, but institutional hypocrisy.
If the Minister for Education and Youth is serious about accountability, then the first and most urgent question must be this: why does Ireland continue to underfund post-primary education compared to our OECD peers? Why are schools forced into the invidious position of asking parents to plug gaps that should never exist? And why is political energy being expended on regulating transparency around scarcity, rather than eliminating that scarcity altogether?
Laying the blame at the door of schools which ask for voluntary contributions is becoming tiresome. For many schools, the need for voluntary contributions is simple: they are not receiving enough funding to meet their day-to-day expenses.
Schools are not the problem. They are holding together an under-resourced system with goodwill, often unpaid labour, and community fundraising. Until the State fully accepts and funds its responsibility for education, any attempt to lecture schools on accountability rings hollow and will most likely be met with anger, not compliance.
Parents have, for years, paid for books, paid voluntary contributions and charges, and carried out fundraising in order to help schools keep their heads above water. We do not take for granted their contributions – and we thank them sincerely.
- John McHugh is principal at Ardscoil Rís on Griffith Avenue, Dublin 9
