Education on the cheap - Paying for water is not the problem

THE row about asking primary schools to pay for water tells us a lot about ourselves.

The most obvious is that we still imagine water a limitless resource and that we do not need to reconsider how we use it; that we can continue to enjoy it without having to pay for it.

Yet, we accept that our schools have to pay for heating oil, electricity, phones and other basic services, so why not water? The argument that schoolchildren get it free at home does not hold. It is only a matter of time before we all have to pay for water, despite heart-beating assurances from local and national politicians.

That schools cannot afford to pay for water is an entirely different matter.

That’s, as our befuddled-when-it-suits Taoiseach might say, a horse of an entirely different kettle. That’s about the chronic underfunding of our schools.

We spend just 4.6% of our GDP on education but the OECD average — remember, just the average, not the top rate — stands at nearly half that again at 6.2%.

So, not only have we bet the family silver on a future sustained by a friendly, jobs-for-all, knowledge-based economy, we want to get there on the cheap. This dangerous disparity has already been challenged.

Banker and former attorney-general Peter Sutherland has spoken in the most direct terms, warning about our education system, saying it is not in any way as good as we think it is and that it is massively underfunded. He was also critical of politicians, who, he says, have refused to reintroduce fees to bolster our struggling third-level institutions.

The situation in our primary schools, where promises to reduce class sizes have become a hardy annual, is even worse. The capitation grant for each pupil was increased by €15 in the budget but that only brought it to €178.50 per pupil, hardly enough to keep a half-decent greyhound in training for a fortnight.

Our primary school system is made up of more than 3,000 privately owned institutions. Each struggling with solvency, dependent on fundraising by parents and, very often, inspiring teachers. Without these, they would be stretched to offer anything more than the most rudimentary education. Of 200 schools assessed by the Irish Primary Principles’ Network last year, the average grant was €25,000 and the average running costs were €48,000.

Even Michael McDowell did not imagine that disadvantage of that order could be inspiring.

Despite Education Minister Mary Hanafin’s announcement of a new model for primary schools last week — she proposes “a new State model of a community national school” — we wonder if the reform needed to realise our ambitions will ever be put in place.

Right on cue for the pantomime season we had an instalment of you-did and I-did-not politics as a series of ministers blamed each other for the water row.

It is terribly sad that at this time of great wealth that we must watch our schools try to make ends meet all because of poor political leadership and political mismanagement.

That sadness is deepened when you remember that education was the conduit for one of the most revolutionary and empowering innovations in our history.

Donogh O’Malley introduced free education nearly four decades ago, changing all of our lives for the better. How we could do with such boldness and ambition today. Rather than be inspired by such imagination we are prepared to sit and accept the inevitable U-turn — and this one arrived earlier than usual, practice does after all make perfect.

That probably tells us more about ourselves than we’d like to know.