Breandan MacSuibhne
Brendan Behan and his Donegal staycation
CAN we stop with the scaremongering of parents, please? It’s back-to-school time again and along with it comes the predictable annual alarmist reports of how much it supposedly costs to get kids back to class.
Depending on which massively exaggerated survey you believe, it costs anything from €330 to €949 for a primary school pupil, every September. Except it doesn’t. It’s absolute nonsense. Parents would want to be made of money if this was truly the case. And to push this narrative only has one effect: to spook those whose kids are just starting school, at what should be a joyous time.
Parents whose kids are already in the system know it’s a crock, and scratch their heads in wonder every year as the myth of the sky-high school bills gets airtime.
The fallacy is exposed by ads on the radio every day for the likes of Aldi, Lidl and Tesco, telling us how they’re selling uniforms for a fiver. It provokes a feeling of cognitive dissonance.
I’m not certain what the purpose of this yearly manufactured panic is. It could be what sociologists call the ‘noble lie’ — inflating an issue as a way to raise awareness of it.
As a worthy issue, the media reports it as fact without drilling down into the details. They’re not going to get into any trouble if it’s wrong, but it’s irresponsible and causes more problems than it solves.
When you look into one survey, for example — the Irish League of Credit Unions — they obviously assume parents are mad, unnecessarily buying a full, new, vastly overpriced uniform each term. In real life, nobody does that.
Their calculation factors in the cost of food, extracurricular activities and voluntary contributions.
It fails to mention that 1,580 schools provide free meals — and anyway, who adds in the cost of feeding their child with the school bills? Extra-curricular means ‘after-school’, and voluntary means ‘not compulsory’. If any school forces you to pay funds you can’t pay or don’t want to pay, report them to the Department of Education.
Going back to school is a cost that parents have to budget for, and it merits mentioning how many struggle to do so, myself included. In general, it usually costs about
€150 all-in, which is a significant extra, especially if you have a bigger family. But it’s for an entire year’s education — something we appreciate now, more than ever before. Books and shoes are expensive, and it’s a pain when you land on a year when they’ve both gone up a shoe size and have outgrown their old uniform and gym kit. When that happens, obviously it costs more. But it doesn’t have to be blown up into the cost of a second-hand car. This year, Barnardos — which is a brilliant charity for vulnerable children — brought the news that almost a fifth of parents don’t want their kids to go back to school next month, as they are scared of coronavirus. Another way of looking at it: 82pc are happy for their children to return. Also, this study was taken before the school return roadmap was announced last Monday, which was a game-changer and renders the finding obsolete.
Maybe they hope that it will press the Government into providing more financial supports, which is a fine aim, but there should be some appreciation and acknowledgement of progress, too.
At the beginning of this year, the Department of Education provided an extra €1 million for free books for around 15,000 DEIS schools, which any child can attend if there’s one within travel distance.
In 2018, the Department of Social Welfare gave an extra €2.1m to the backto-school clothing and footwear scheme.
The education system costs some €10 billion a year — and a €375m injection has just been announced to get classes back safely amid the pandemic.
These sensationalist scare stories have to stop. They do not serve interests, they just discredit a sincere cause — allowing cynics to dismiss real concerns as overblown whingeing from people who don’t want to pay for anything.