Teaching Matters PROF TOM COLLINSThe recent High Court decision regarding health insurance has some interesting parallels in the field of education. The concept of community rating, endorsed by the High Court, compensates for the differential risk exposure of health insurance companies, depending on their target market. It requires those companies with less risk exposure to contribute to a fund to compensate those with greater exposure - hence the concept of "risk equalisation".
In this way, the burden of health insurance is distributed equally throughout the entire community, regardless of the health status of different groups within it.
Schools also have differential risk exposure depending on the composition of the population which they serve. Schools working with disadvantaged student populations will inevitably encounter more challenges in arriving at the same levels of academic attainment as their more advantaged counterparts. And while there are some compensatory resources provided for schools coping with special educational needs, the philosophy of risk equalisation, and a resource allocation model based on it, are still a long way off in the world of second-level education.
The fallacy of so-called school league tables lies in their failure to take account of the differing populations within the schools they are comparing. In their failure to do this, such tables are frequently inaccurate, invariably incomplete and always invidious.
If they were to have any meaning at all, such tables would control for all extraneous factors in a way as to ensure that they are comparing like with like. In this way, for instance, they might take all students with the same reading age on entering second level and look at the variations in achievement within this cohort on leaving school. This would allow for a measure of the "value-added" - at least on the academic front - by the different schooling experiences of the children.
The real issue for comparison, then, is not the overall average student attainment in a particular school, whatever the criteria used, but the attainment which the child would have reached if in another school. If school league tables ever get to the point where they measure the "added-value" they may then be doing what they now say they are doing.
However, even were such tables to arrive at this level of sophistication in their composition, they should still be open to question. Education is both a private good and a public one. As a private good, it is a key element in shaping the later life and career opportunities of children and young people. As a public good, it is expected to enhance the quality of cultural and civic life and, crucially, to contribute to a more equal, inclusive and harmonious society through which disadvantages of background can be negated and overcome.
Not only do school leage tables fail to accord any value to the critical social roles which schools in disadvantaged areas play, but they implicitly undermine this role. In this way they feed into a process of educational segregation and the privatisation of education. Schools and teachers, sometimes in the most challenging of environments, find their work devalued and find themselves trapped in a self-fulfilling vortex of negativity.
Meanwhile, other schools are allowed to proceed unhindered in translating a privileged background into a privileged future.
Such league tables do, of course, draw attention to the way in which second-level schooling reflects and replicates the wider social structure in the absence of a widely shared national priority of addressing the needs of the least advantaged.
The dynamics of the processes of selection and segregation in second-level schooling therefore present a serious immediate challenge to educational policymakers and to the overall development and nature of Irish society in the long term.
A funding and resourcing model based on a risk equalisation strategy would aim to generate a per capita funding formula which would incentivise and compensate schools based on the social, ethnic and ability mix of their intake. Within such a funding framework, schools could feel that they were operating on a level playing field; they could take strategic decisions about how they wished to position themselves in the wider milieu of educational provision in their localities and, most importantly of all, the teaching resource would follow the teaching challenge.
In this regard the new recurrent funding model developed by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) for third-level education is particularly innovative. This allows for preferential funding rates to third-level institutions for particular categories of students, currently under-represented in undergraduate student populations. Equally, in view of the national objective of growing the numbers of postgraduate students, such students also carry significant preferential rates in terms of institutional funding.
With growing affluence in Ireland there is an inevitable tendency amongst better-off parents to purchase educational advantage, either by going outside the State system or by supplementing it through grind schools, by the purchase of one-to-one tuition or through a repeat leaving year. Students who cannot afford such options are clearly at a disadvantage within the competitive race for Leaving Certificate points. Public policy should aim to offset such disadvantage.
School selection is of course a matter of individual choice on the part of students and their parents. Public policy should be structured in such a way as to aim to align private choice with public priorities. It is important for many reasons that education policy in Ireland follows a redistributional agenda. Failure to do so will lead to a loss of confidence in education within already marginalised groups and close off opportunities for full participation in the economic, civic and cultural life of the society to significant sections of the population. Schools must always challenge the processes of pre-ordained failure. School league tables simply make it more difficult for them to do so.
Prof Tom Collins is head of education at NUI Maynooth
