FIONA LOONEY FREE EDUCATION? IT ISN’T FREE
IWROTE a cheque for €150 yesterday. I had to go looking for the chequebook – so long is it since I’ve used it – and when I went to fill in the stub, I noted the last cheque I wrote was for piano lessons, in April. In fact, almost every cheque in that otherwise rarely used book was for something related to school. Piano lessons to equip my daughter for her Leaving Cert music practical; computer tuition towards a certificate in, well, computers; and a whole sheaf of TY-related cheques.
This latest – the first of the new school year – was for €150, for the ‘facilities and equipment fund’. Other schools call this the voluntary contribution, though in my daughter’s school it’s not actually voluntary. I signed the cheque, she put it in the pocket of her new €65 school uniform skirt, picked her new €10 homework journal from the top of her €300 pile of new books and headed off for her hourlong orientation session at her State, non-fee-paying school. Back to free education.
It’s not really the cost I object to – though I certainly don’t sail through September with glee. Rather, it’s the widely peddled notion that education in Ireland is free. In two weeks, my older two children will return to college, into a system that more or less made a ticker-tape parade of ‘abolishing’ third-level fees a few years back. In the week they return, I will electronically transfer €6,000 into that free system. As the students themselves might say, How That Happen?
Every year, the fiction of free education is exposed by both the bank balance of parents and the State and voluntary agencies charged with helping the hardest-hit through this expensive time. Yesterday, the St Vincent de Paul reported a 20% increase in the number of calls it has received this year for assistance with back-to-school costs. One of the reasons for the upsurge in hardship cases, the charity claims, is the delay in processing applications for the Back to School Clothing and Footwear allowance: the Department of Social Protection reports that having processed 127,000 cases, there are a further 12,000 cases outstanding – that’s 12,000 children, in other words, who are starting or returning to school tomorrow without their parents having received the uniform allowance. And that’s just uniforms. Add in the cost of books, stationery, equipment, PE gear and the myriad other stealth cheques that will come down the line between now and next summer, and it’s a miracle some children manage to avail of the ‘free’ education system at all. And of course, as we know from agencies like the SVP, many don’t.
NOBODY is disputing that educating children costs money. And while some expenses deserve serious scrutiny – I have now bought somewhere in the region of 300 schoolbooks for three children with just five years between the eldest and youngest, and have managed to ‘pass down’ fewer than ten – the reality is that none of us wants to send our children through a system that cuts costs and corners at the expense of a decent education. But with a capitation grant of just €170 per primary school child and €296 for secondary school children, there is obviously a serious shortfall between what the State provides and the actual cost of educating children in State schools, and parents are bearing the entire brunt of those additional costs – costs which, in almost every case, exceed the original grant. In other words, not only is the so-called ‘free’ education system not free, but the State is not even paying half of it.
Which again, might be acceptable – however hard to swallow – if the Government would only acknowledge that this is the case. But by constantly clapping itself on the back over a ‘free’ schooling system whose very survival depends on stealth taxes in the form of tattered chequebooks, voluntary contributions and raffles, the Government prevents real debate about the future of funding in our schools.
We have one of the best education systems in the world and we should be very proud of that. But it doesn’t come cheap and it certainly is not free. To suggest otherwise isn’t just insulting to hard-pressed parents who recognise September as the cruellest month – it also prevents us ever achieving an effective, efficient economic plan for education funding based on transparency and simple maths. Now surely that is as easy as ABC.