The latest OECD report on education should serve as a reality check on funding of Irish schools, writes John Carr.
According to the Government, education is central to protecting and growing Ireland's prosperity and ensuring greater social inclusion. Among the "key objectives" of the programme for government are improvements in the human and financial resources available to our schools.
It's the type of motherhood and apple pie rhetoric that characterises every programme for government, written as they are in a twilight zone between post-election euphoria and the first "think-in" meeting of the major government party. Little damage would be done if such documents were filed under fiction in local libraries.
But, if previous experience is anything to go by, this sort of aspirational verbiage will be trotted out regularly, every time minuscule increases in school funding are announced during the coming years.
Governments in Ireland regularly use lofty ambition as a smokescreen. Politicians love to tell us where we are going, and what life will be like when we get there, rather than face the fact of where we are and accepting the responsibility.
The danger is that smokescreens build up a false sense of security. Just ask our sports fans who were led to believe our soccer team would make the Euro 2008 finals and the rugby team would win the World Cup! But every now and then something like a Georgia or Slovakia comes along to break the spell.
The report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Education at a Glance, is the education equivalent of our recent sporting reality checks. Its pages strip away the rhetoric of the programme for government and hold a mirror up to the reality of continued underspending on the Irish education system.
It compares among other things how much OECD countries spend on education. And what leaps from its pages is the fact that in terms of education spending, Ireland is the Scrooge McDuck of the OECD.
On average, other countries spend 6.2 per cent of GDP on education, while the comparable figure in Ireland is just 4.6 per cent. We talk the talk of how past investment in education contributed to economic success and of the need to protect prosperity by improving finances to our schools. But that's hard to reconcile with the fact that at primary level we spend more than 40 per cent less per child than the Danes, Norwegians and Americans and 60 per cent less than Luxembourg.
The report shows clearly how France, Italy, Japan and Germany, countries not nearly as rich as Ireland in terms of GDP per capita, substantially outspend us when it comes to primary education. (That's one the German ambassador missed!) Crucially, it also shows that this is part of a trend. Over the past decade, as Ireland has got richer, our Government has spent comparatively less and less on our schools. For example, in 1995, when we were less well off, we spent 5.3 per cent of our wealth on our schools.
Irish parents don't really need this 450-page report to point out how little the State spends on primary education. To them the results of government underspending on primary education are obvious. Irish children are taught in the second most overcrowded classrooms in Europe. Most of them have to depend on the weather for a PE class because the majority of schools do not have an indoor facility. Children with a speech and language difficulty do not have access to a therapy service. More and more children are being taught in prefabs, some in the very prefabs in which their parents were taught. And when it comes to computers, our failure to spend shows why one in every five computers in Irish schools is clapped out, a figure that is rising by the day.
This September, the average parent's bank balance will reflect State skimping on education spending. Book bills mark the start of the Irish school year compared with other countries where school books are provided. The packed lunch in Irish school bags contrasts with the hot lunch provided by other countries. And the annual request for a "voluntary" contribution, sponsorship or charitable donation sets us apart from others where free primary education means exactly that. The begging letters go out because government spending fails to meet even basic running costs of schools such as energy, insurance, cleaning, secretarial and caretaking services and classroom equipment. But then how could it? For within an already underfunded education system for every €5 we spend on a primary school pupil we spend €7 at second level and €10 at third level.
Today's factual OECD report should be our education reality check. It should cause the Government to take stock and realise that its current policies are at odds with the programme for government and are actually putting future prosperity at risk and widening the social divide in our society.
December's budget will show if any lessons have been learned. And it should cause the rest of us to question the rhetoric from here on out and focus on the reality. How much longer can we accept the fantasy of a world-class education system on a shoestring budget?
John Carr is general secretary of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation