Notes on the Front

The next time Minister Michael Martin addresses the Dail about knowledge capital, or Minister Mary Hanafin prattles on about ‘investing in our future’ or any other Minister talks about ‘world class educational institutions’ or ‘highly educated workforce’ or whatever rhetorical flourish they use to talk up their ‘record of achievement’ in education – progressive TDs should do one thing: heckle. Sustained, creative, noisy heckling. Not just an interruption, not just a ‘will the Deputy resume his/her seat’ disruption, but good ol’ fashioned don’t-let-the-speaker-get-away-with-it heckling.

Because Fianna Fail should not be allowed any bragging rights about the education seystem – not after the way they’ve been starving and devastating the sector.

Understandably, the media has been focussing on the daily scandals emerging out of the health sector. Understandable, because in health, it can literally be a matter of life and death. Nonetheless, education can mean life or death to an economy and thankfully some noise is starting to be made:

• The joint opinion piece in the Irish Times by the TCD Provost and UCD President highlighting the woeful under-investment in third-level education.
• ASTI’s recent report showing that we joint last in the OECD in terms of secondary level investment.
• The Sunday Tribune’s recent stories on the chronic under-funding of the primary sector with staff dividing their time between teaching and fund-raising.

Combine this with one of the worst records in pre-school education and adult/life-long education in the EU and, well, you get the picture. And just as important is Forfas’s indictment of the Government’s record on ‘knowledge capital’.

In their Annual Competitiveness Reports, Forfas benchmarks Ireland’s performance across a range of education-related, or knowledge-infrastructure categories. What it shows in traffic light coding is devastating:

Of the 26 categories only 3 show our performance to be ‘strong or improving’. In the other 23 categories our performance is rated as average, causing concern or poor. Even more concerning is Forfas’s tracking of these categories since 2000. In 15 categories our performance has either remained static or deteriorated– nearly 60%. In only one category – third-level R&D expenditure – did performance improve to ‘green light’ status. But this shouldn’t be too surprising – educational expenditure as a % of GNP has fallen by over 11%.

Recently, we have seen the pathetic carry-on over IT investment in schools. Ireland ranks at the bottom of the industrialised nations in IT school investment. A report commissioned by the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin,TD – which she refused to publish for months (and which was only made public through a leak) – concluded that the Government’s capital investment in school IT is insufficient and would leave Irish students trailing far behind their EU counterparts. With half of school computer facilities unusable, and with staff reduced to collecting supermarket vouchers to get new and replacement equipment. And what’s the Minister’s response?

‘It would be lovely, she said, to be able to put “and awful lot more into computers”. However, given the global financial turbulence, the Government’s priority was to keep the budget and the economy on track and “that is our first responsibility”’.

So the reason we have a third-rate IT school infrastructure is because of the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US? The only response is an extended round of heckling.

But before we use these figures as a telephone pole to beat the Government with, let’s take some stock. There is no doubting that the primary contributor is a long-term lack of investment. Yes, there is a question of output and productivity in expenditure but, in truth, it is hard to see how we can be a ‘world class home of knowledge capital’ without, at least, reaching the investment levels in other European countries. What would it cost to bring our educational expenditure to the levels in other countries?

Just to reach the average expenditure in these countries we would need to pour in €2.6 billion – or about 30% more than what we invest currently, never mind the even higher increases needed to reach the level of societies that really take education and the ‘knowledge economy’ seriously.

And this only includes formal education. Now factor in R&D costs, adult/life-long learning, etc. and we can see that just to bring us up to the average of our peer group in the EU, we are talking billions of Euros.

Has any political party confronted this fact? Has any political party put a price tag on competitiveness? Has any political party attempted to engage people in an open and honest dialogue about the scale of investment that is necessary to achieve even the average levels?

No – neither the Government nor the Opposition parties. Instead, all parties (even the Greens) participated in the tax-cut auction of the last election to a greater or lesser extent. None have so far spoke of how to obtain the resources needed to provide the investment resources. Raise taxes? Borrow? Cut spending in other areas such as health or housing? And with the Exchequer deficit running out of control (estimated by the ESRI to grow to over €7.5 billion in 2009) the issue of investment sources becomes even more critical and more difficult.

We need a mature debate. We’re not getting it. The Government prattles on, indulging itself in overblown rhetoric while presiding over an education system that is ill-preparing students for tomorrow’s economic and social challenge.

There’s only one responsible and mature thing to do: heckle.