New challenges in education

Tom Collins, professor of education at NUI Maynooth, will be writing regularly in The Irish Times over the coming academic year. In this introductory article, he surveys the challenges facing Irish education.

Planning for education is a fraught business. While education usually tends to support change and to cement change, it rarely anticipates it.

Today's generation of graduates, mostly born in the mid-1980s, are emerging into a country and a world that is unrecognisable from that into which they were born. Such profound changes have swept over Ireland even in the short time span of two decades as to make one extremely cautious in prognosticating on the future.

Notwithstanding such caution, one can be reasonably sure that most will spend increasing proportions of their lives in formal education. They will go to school earlier, through formal pre-school provision, and they will stay in full-time education longer, through an expansion in post-graduate studies. In addition, through distance education and part-time study people will return to education more regularly throughout their adult lives.

The formal system will need to adjust continuously to mass education, not merely to generalised participation but also to participation through life. Donagh O'Malley's initiatives in the 1960s heralded the beginning of mass second-level education in Ireland in the 1970s. Even after 30 years, this experiment is still proving to be challenging for many in the sector. Large minorities either drop out before the end of second level or fail to attain minimum standards at Leaving Certificate. Issues concerning discipline, the mental health of students, and the processes of disaffection with school are achieving growing prominence in the public consciousness and in the literature.

Affluent Irish parents, responding to the challenges of mass second-level education, are increasingly insulating themselves from it by opting out of the public sector and by sending their children to fee-paying "private" schools. This has the effect of further segregating the social classes and ethnic groups; it is an investment in desirable friends at least as much as it is in desirable teachers.

For the non fee-paying schools - whether state or voluntary secondary - the effect of this selectivity is to diminish morale; to reduce the mix of students and to lose out in the PR race - an increasingly important element in a school's armoury.

In the period since O'Malley, primary education in Ireland has also undergone a deep metamorphosis, in particular in its understanding and appreciation of pedagogy. This is a sector which has been much maligned historically for its approach to teaching and learning, so it is significant that such profound change should have occurred here.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about primary education in Ireland is that it is now unusual to find a child in primary school who doesn't want to be there.

In the past 30 years the syllabus has moved from being syllabus-centred, through being child-sensitive to one which is currently child-active. This change is creating an environment which is stimulating, explorative and enriching for the child. However, while the level of specialist resources to children has greatly increased in recent years, there continues to be a concern that some children who transfer from primary school have difficulty in coping with the academic demands of second level.

It should also be noted that the primary sector has been on the front line in encountering a whole new wave of children in Irish education in the form of those born outside of Ireland or to foreign nationals in Ireland. There are now more than 100 different nationalities in Irish primary schools and these account for at least 10 per cent of the primary school population. Any one school may have numerous nationalities. There are cases where there are up to 40 different nationalities to be found in certain schools.

The primary sector has coped with this challenge with little fuss or even with little public debate. Undoubtedly there are now more native Polish speakers, for instance, in Irish primary schools than there are native Irish speakers. The realisation that "Irishness" is now a much more complex concept than it was formerly will raise profound challenges for all education sectors in Ireland in the coming years.

In common with the other sectors, third level has also succeeded in greatly expanding the participation rates in recent years. The huge expansion in providers and courses, coupled with a declining cohort of school leavers, has resulted in what some commentators have now called the end of the points race.

It is to be hoped that this development will ease the pressure in second level on Leaving Certificate points. This has forced schools and school children towards a narrow view of learning, where the learning which carries no points carries no value. It has devalued the immeasurably important work of teachers in the pastoral care of their students and in their extra-curricular activities.

While there have been significant new initiatives introduced into the second-level curriculum over recent years, in areas such as the Leaving Cert Applied and Transition Year, the mainstream curriculum has shown a remarkable tenacity, largely sustained by the points system.

Such curricular reform as has occurred has tended to be narrowly conceived, usually confined to content change within a particular discipline or to the introduction of a new discipline.

A more fundamental approach would aim to change the child's experience of second-level education away from subject-specific coaching to one which is developmental in focus and exploratory and investigative in methodology. It would be more holistic in approach, drawing upon the multiple intelligences of the child and emphasising the importance of social and emotional well-being, self-motivation and capability for self-directed learning. It would shift the teaching role from one which relies primarily on instruction to one which is focused mainly on enabling and facilitating learning.

With profound changes underway in the nature of the family and the home, the significance of the home as a learning domain continues to decline. A State commitment to universal pre-school education is therefore likely to be the next major educational frontier to be addressed in Ireland.

This ought to be embarked upon within a political and policy context which makes life-long learning the overarching theme of Irish education. Such a commitment would underpin the personal well-being of all Irish citizens, the on-going economic development of the State and perhaps most importantly of all, the quality of civic, cultural and political life in this society.