Our children will feel Budget pain

TEACHING MATTERS:THE Central Bank Report for 1975 in Ireland noted ruefully that, while we all agreed we had to make sacrifices, we could not agree on who was going to make them, writes Tom Collins

In failing to reach agreement on this, Irish society of the 1970s pushed the pain into the 1980s, where it was carried mostly by the long-term unemployed and young emigrants entering the workforce for the first time.

All budgets make choices about where State resources will be allocated or withdrawn. This is true both in times of plenty and scarcity. In either context, they provide a persuasive insight into the values and priorities of a society at a point in time.

Last week's Budget included the following decisions: an increase in class size in primary schools from 27 to 28; the closure of the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education; the abolition of the Educational Disadvantage Committee; a reduction in school library grants of €2.1 million; the restriction of aid for school books to disadvantaged-DEIS schools to the tune of €7.5 million; a reduction of €4.3 million in the capitation funding for Travellers at primary level and €2 million at second level; a reduction in grants for youth services by €4.4 million; and the deferral of the implementation of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs (Epsen) Act (2004).

These cuts impact negatively on all children, but particularly on children with special needs and children from disadvantaged backgrounds. While these measures will have a very real impact on the educational ambitions and attainment levels of children in school, their contribution to the balancing of the public finances is minimal.

There is clear evidence that, while all investment in education yields a rich dividend for the economic and social well-being of a society, the highest returns accrue from investment in early-life education. Currently, the costs of putting a child through eight years of primary education is about one-quarter of the costs of four years of higher education.

The benefits of investment in early-life education are most pronounced in the poorer socio-economic groups. As advocated in this column before, failure to direct resources at this stage proves more and more costly later. Furthermore, this failure spills into many other aspects of the life of the society in areas such as health and well-being, employability, social order and cohesion.

Equally, the cutbacks in early-life education are all the more surprising when set against decisions concerning other aspects of education. In this case, €265 million, an increase of 44 per cent, is provided for infrastructural investment in science, technology and innovation. Similarly, Science Foundation Ireland received a €7 million increase, bringing its budget to €179 million. This investment is predicated on the assumption that it will underpin the growth of a knowledge economy. One wonders how we can hope to build a robust knowledge economy if we neglect the earlier levels of education. Ironically, this neglect is most evident in science and technology.

In A Modest Proposal(1729), Jonathan Swift, despairing of the possibilities of introducing a "vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance", proceeded to reflect on the challenge of providing for children in "such a manner as, instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, they shall contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands".

Unlike our experiences of the recession of the 1980s, in this Budget, we have decided that the sacrifices have to be made now. Like Swift, we will leave it to the children to make them.

• Professor Tom Collins is head of Education at NUI Maynooth