Government urged to commit greater funding to education

THE Government was urged yesterday to commit itself to a massive increase in spending on education.

Currently we spend 4.3% of GDP on education, compared with about 7% in other highly developed economies, such as Denmark, Sweden and the US.

NUI Maynooth Professor of Education Tom Collins made the call at a Fianna Fáil conference marking 40 years of free second-level education. Prof Collins is chairman of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), whose report, due next spring, will call for a radical overhaul of the teaching of maths, science and oral Irish.

“We should be aiming for 7% (of GDP),” Prof Collins said. “We’ve got Sweden, America, Iceland, they’re all the ones tipping 7%; in most cases they’re above it. That would be public and private (spending), of course.

“I think we should commit ourselves to a percentage of GDP on education; I think it should be around 7%. In that way you would not have different sectors competing with each other within education, which has been the problem,” he said.

UCD president Prof Hugh Brady said British universities were offering inducements to the top 20% of school-leavers. This was a challenge that was not going to go away. The goal was to brand Ireland as a world leader in Masters and PhD training, for which we must establish fourth-level graduate schools to focus this training and create a culture of life-long learning subsequent to graduation.

Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin said the collaboration between education and industry had to be ramped up and accelerated.