VECs play vital role and as public bodies should be transparent

FOR most people the local VEC is the group which runs their town’s vocational school or community college.

From a tradition going back to the early 20th century, the Vocational Education Committee structure has evolved into a highly important public and social service for a wide sector of Irish society.

While most of the sector’s €1 billion annual budget goes into the running of schools and teachers’ salaries, VECs play a much broader role, particularly for people of all ages who are or were not suited for one reason or another to mainstream education.

Youthreach programmes in towns and cities offer an alternative to senior cycle second-level education for hundreds of teenagers who might otherwise drop out of education entirely.

Further education colleges operated by VECs are so important that many had three applicants for every one of the 31,500 available places this year, despite calls for them take in more students and cater for a growing demand for skills training.

Through its adult education services, offering everything from basic literacy through to courses that will enable people avail of college education, the sector gives a second chance to thousands of people whose schooling was cut short for a range of reasons earlier in their lives.

For all of this, the feeling has been around for many years that the VEC system is over-bureaucratic and that duplication of services from county to county diverts money that might better be spent on offering quality local education services.

An obvious and glaring example is the fact that each of the 33 VECs has a separate payroll system for the 8,000 teachers working in their 250 second-level schools, although this is due to be centralised or shared between various VEC headquarters under the Croke Park public service reform deal.

Other areas for prospective savings include sharing of functions such as service and capital procurement, technology and personnel management, all currently operated by each VEC.

One difficulty with VECs is the absence of clear transparencies around how they operate. Although the fault lies with the Department of Finance which governs the relevant legislation, the VECs are not covered by Freedom of Information laws. This means the costs of the committees which run them — more than half of whose membership is made up of local councillors and the rest by staff and community representatives — is not publicly available.

The public or the media are not legally entitled, therefore, to know how much taxpayers are forking out for these people’s expenses to attend VEC meetings or to go to conferences at home or abroad.

Doubtless, like any public service and regardless of the economic climate, those who pay for the VECs should have a right to access the funding and decision-making mechanisms. If measures to make them more efficient are on the table, they should make their work more transparent and show the public that the restructuring of the VECs will not lead to any cuts in services or reduced value for money.