THE PHYSICAL infrastructure of many of Ireland’s schools should be a cause for national shame, Lord David Puttnam, the Open University chancellor and a British Labour Party peer, has said.
Lord Puttnam, who lives in Skibbereen, Co Cork, said students and teachers perform better in best built environments and that choices were made here during the boom years to spend money on less worthy projects.
Speaking in Dublin at the Institute of International and European Affairs, he said education spending should account for a minimum of 7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).
An OECD report last year found that Ireland invests about 4.7 per cent of its GDP in the sector.
“The physical infrastructure of many of the primary and secondary schools in Ireland should be a cause for national shame,” he said. “When I speak of infrastructure I most specifically include every aspect of connectivity along with its hardware and software.
“Choices were made to spend billions . . . on buildings . . . which now lie either empty, underused or simply not needed.
“Had some fraction of that sum been committed to refurbishing the quality of the schools and classrooms the nation would be far better placed to dig itself out of the hole that all that accumulated debt and waste has helped to create.”
In an address entitled Educating for the Digital Society, Lord Puttnam said that, instead of spending on education, Ireland had for too long "relied on the good offices of the church and the largesse of Europe to address and solve" problems in the sector.
He said innovations and successes presided over by former minister for education Donogh O’Malley in the 1960s had been “insufficiently built on”.
“It is now down to a test of national will to invest in the future to rediscover those things for which this country has rightly been celebrated; learning, culture, imagination, inventiveness and a unique sense of community in place which the world has in the past, and please God will again, come to admire and even envy.”
Lord Puttnam, who produced the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire and now leads a UK taskforce which aims to boost education technology exports, said the internet had changed the face of education and that a considerable amount of learning now took place outside the school gates.
“The existence of this extraordinary cornucopia of knowledge [the internet] also makes the need for teachers and mentors, in essence trusted learning guides, more crucial . . . there are very considerable challenges in sorting the wheat from the chaff,” he said.
“My single greatest concern is unless education itself moves then the young people they teach will begin to think our form of education is not relevant to their lives.”
