Time to end the State subsidy for private schools

OPINION: Why is the taxpayer still subsidising elitist fee-paying secondary schools?

OPINION:Why is the taxpayer still subsidising elitist fee-paying secondary schools?

IN A recession one would expect certain industries to thrive. The ill wind of an economic meltdown will, for understandable reasons, cause budget supermarkets, pawnbrokers and second-hand clothes stores to thrive. Less understandable, but perhaps more impressive, is the resilience of our nation’s elite private schools which, according to figures released last week, managed to enrol over 26,000 pupils this year despite charging fees in the region of €6,000 a year for day students and up to €16,000 for boarders.

Now, while I am reluctant to criticise any institution successfully piloting its way through such choppy economic waters, it has to be said that a number of these schools share certain characteristics that make them unappealing to those who believe that equality of opportunity ought to be the foundation stone of our education system. For example a number of fee-paying secondary schools encourage parents to put their children’s names down on their waiting list at birth.

More worryingly the admissions policies of these schools are blatantly discriminatory in that when awarding places they give preference to the children of former students, siblings of current students, attendees of their fee-paying junior schools and relatives of the their teaching staff.

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Even more intimidating for those outside the existing educational golden circle is the fact that many of these schools insist on interviewing both the applicant child and their parents as part of their admissions process. The result of all of this is that some of the best schools in the country are virtually off limits to the children of immigrants, members of the Travelling community or those requiring special education whose needs are often such that they would benefit most from having access to them.

Of course in a free country parents have every right to send their children to a far-from-free school. Harder to understand is the lavish State funding that these fee-paying schools continue to receive that costs the exchequer over €100 million a year, the bulk of which goes toward teachers’ salaries.

While the provision of such funding might have been acceptable at the height of the Celtic Tiger it is much harder to justify in an era when the Health Service Executive (HSE) receives nearly 150,000 applications a year from parents seeking a back-to-school allowance of between €200-€300 to enable them to buy school uniforms and basic footwear for their children.

In an age when parents feel obliged to collect supermarket vouchers to acquire essential computer and sports equipment for the schools that their offspring attend it is impossible to understand why the ordinary taxpayer should be forced to sit by and watch as their hard-earned taxes are used to fund schools that have a deliberate policy of discriminating against their offspring.

At a very minimum fee-paying schools should be forced to choose between adopting an open and transparent admissions process or face the removal of all State funding. Unsurprisingly the ability of these schools to access funds both from parents and the taxpayer means that these schools have a resource advantage that provides services only dreamt of in the State sector.

So what explains the economic miracle that these private schools have become? It is hard not to conclude that the disastrous decision of the rainbow coalition to abolish third level fees in 1996 is possibly the most significant factor. The major beneficiaries of free fees were not children from our nation’s poorest families as they were never liable to pay them but instead middle-class families who, relieved of the future burden of third level fees, responded to this unexpected and undeserved windfall by reallocating their resources towards their offspring’s secondary education leading to an unprecedented demand for grind schools and fee-paying secondary schools with the consequence that some excellent State schools found they could not fill places and were forced to close.

Having enjoyed such advantages at second level it is hardly surprising that the majority of the alumni of these schools progress on to third level with fee-paying institutions regularly filling nine of the top 10 places in the lists of feeder schools to some of our nation’s leading universities including both UCD and Trinity. Worse still some of our professions remain virtual no-go zones for students from working-class backgrounds. For example according to a report published by the Higher Education Authority last August not one student entering university courses in pharmacy or medicine in 2008-09 came from an “unskilled” family background. By comparison even though only 5 per cent of the population are classified as “higher professional” their children grabbed 32 per cent of the available places in medicine, 27 per cent in veterinary medicine and 23 per cent of the places in law.

In the face of such continuing inequality surely the time has come to end State subsidies to private schools which would free up over € 100 million a year that could be reallocated to schools in disadvantaged areas. For in the absence of such a cash injection some of our most vulnerable schoolchildren may have to follow the example of Mark Twain and ensure that they never let their schooling get in the way of their education.


James McDermott lectures in law at University College Dublin