Class sizes and third-level funding are the key issues

Continuing our series ahead of Budget 2018 on October 10, Katherine Donnelly looks at the hot topics in the education sector

PRIMARY class sizes, funding for schools and how to pay for higher education are among the key focuses of the education sector in the run-up to Budget 2018.

The Department of Education may be the third-highest spending Government department, after Social Protection and Health, but, even with whatever extra is added to its purse, it won’t be able to satisfy the demands on it.

Education Minister Richard Bruton described the 2017 Budget, when an additional €458m was made available, as the start of a major programme of reinvestment in education. It may have represented quite a turnaround from the years of austerity, but much of the extra money merely allowed the system to stand still, or go some way to restoring previous cuts.

At its most obvious, the spending pressure comes from the ongoing rise in enrolments in primary and post-primary schools and in third-level colleges, which translates into a need for more teachers and more buildings.

There are now the equivalent of 104,500 posts in the education sector, including more than 68,000 teachers and some 13,000 special needs assistant in primary and post-primary schools. There are almost 18,000 posts in third-level and a further 2,000 jobs in the civil and public service.

So, it is no surprise pay accounts for about twothirds of the department’s budget for current spending – about €5.8bn this year, some €4.7bn of which is for teachers.

Some 2,400 extra teachers were employed in 2017, but almost 1,700 were to cater for rising pupil numbers, for resource teaching or to restore some of the cuts made to the guidance counselling service in 2012.

With necessary priority given to catering for growing enrolments, fewer than one-third of the posts went on “extras”: new jobs to enhance school leadership and to support the roll-out of the new junior cycle curriculum.

The Department of Education estimates that 2022 will see the combined peak for pupil numbers at both primary and post primary. So the demand for extra teachers, simply to allow the system to stand still, will continue until then.

What then of the firm promise to bring added value to the system and to restart the process of reducing the pupil teacher ratio at primary level, with a focus on smaller classes for junior and senior infants, where it is deemed to make the most difference to children.

The commitment is in the Programme for Government, and, significantly, also in the confidence and supply agreement between the Government and Fianna Fáil.

Fianna Fáil education spokesperson Thomas Byrne said: “The class sizes commitment has to be acted upon. It is one of the things we will be looking at. We don’t want resources for demographic increases passed off as new funding.” Mr Bruton (inset) must also be mindful of the Programme for Government commitment for annual increases in funding for schools, at both primary and

post-primary level, to meet their day-to-day running costs – another victim of the years of austerity, which wasn’t delivered on last year.

Earlier this year, at the annual conference of the Joint Managerial Body, the management representative body for almost 400 secondary schools, its president Fr Paul Connell told senior Department of Education officials school finances were “in crisis” and parents were now providing over 30pc funding, through voluntary contributions and fundraising.

At third-level, a new funding model for higher education is the talking point and employers are expected to be asked to lay the foundation stone, through a levy increase. Last year, the sector saw its first budget increase in a decade, but it was unimpressed. The Irish Universities Association (IUA) is calling for a step change in investment and says universities alone need €129m extra for day-to-day costs in 2018, which is about double what the Government has earmarked for the sector for the next two years.