Political mettle test for the education minister

The question on everybody’s lips in the education sphere will be whether Jan O’Sullivan can maintain the same kind of favourable treatment for her department’s budget as Ruairi Quinn before her, writes Education Correspondent Niall Murray

WITH less than a month to the 2015 budget, Education Minister Jan O’Sullivan has not yet had a formal meeting with Public Expenditure and Reform Minister Brendan Howlin on her spending requirements.

But much of the detail will be thrashed out over the coming weeks and, since taking over from Ruairi Quinn in July, the Limerick-based minister has already had plenty of meetings with interest groups eager to impress on her the needs of their own particular sectors.

Among them have been representatives of teachers and school managers, who have been detailing the effects of recent years’ cutbacks. But despite the various policy changes to reduce day-to-day budgets and the staffing levels given to schools, rising student numbers have seen Department of Education non-capital allocations fall much less than others.

Its €7.85bn budget this year may be €78m less than in 2013, but that 1% fall compares to a reduction of nearly 5% across all Government departments. The question on everybody in the education sphere’s lips will be whether Ms O’Sullivan can maintain the same kind of favourable treatment for the education budget as Mr Quinn before her.

Her answer is an emphatic yes, but the detail of where the axe will or will not fall, remains uncertain.

However, she does have some views on what areas could perhaps avoid any more austerity.

“The cuts that have happened have gone a long way in terms of making it very difficult for schools to manage, so I’m conscious of that,” she told the Irish Examiner.

“I’m also conscious of the demographic issue, we’ve growing demographics so we will need more teachers, we will need more special education teachers, as well as mainstream classroom teachers, and that’s because we have more students. So that is something I will be arguing for in terms of the budget,” Ms O’Sullivan said.

Whether they like it or not, all of those in every sector — from those teaching junior infants to postgraduate supervisors — have to be conscious, like the minister is, of the pressure of growing numbers.

In its latest projections, the Department of Education is working on an assumption of having to cater for 30,000 more primary pupils by autumn 2018, when there are expected to be 574,000 of them — an increase of 5.5%. Likewise, at second-level, student numbers may jump by 12,000 — or 3.5% — in the next three years alone.

Bearing these kind of predictions in mind, Ms O’Sullivan is slow to suggest any reversal of the rate at which schools are allocated classroom teachers.

“I’d say it would be difficult to do it this year [for September 2015]. That would be my initial [view], in looking at figures I’ve seen so far,” she told the Irish Examiner.

Those mainstream staffing schedules now stand at one teacher for every 28 pupils at primary level (increased from 27:1 in 2009) and at 19:1 for second-level schools, pushed up from 18:1 the same year.

But since 2012, second-level schools must also make provisions for guidance counselling time, previously part of a separate allocation, from within that staffing schedule.

Strongly influencing any decisions here may be the figures for this autumn’s total enrolments, but the trouble is that her department will not have exact data in time for the mid-October budget. However, the redaction of a passage about budgetary challenges — in the minister’s briefing notes received in July and partially released by her department this month — hint at possible obstacles to relieving many of recent years’ pressures.

A follow-on note says the full extent of any possible excesses in the areas mentioned, but which are deleted under Freedom of Information law exemptions, would only become clearer when teaching and student numbers become more apparent this month.

“I do want to protect what is there now. I don’t know if there’ll be room for... well, certainly it would be good if we could have some positive developments,” she said.

Ms O’Sullivan was speaking late last week before Cabinet ministers were sure of the budgetary arithmetic, something Mr Howlin may have made a little clearer to his Labour colleagues this week.

“Whatever, on the other side, of the taxation arguments, I won’t go there, but I do think that... it’s absolutely vital that we maintain the quality of our education system, for economic prosperity for the future,” said Ms O’Sullivan.

Having spent the last few years as a junior minister responsible for housing, in the room with some of those she now sits alongside on equal footing at the Cabinet table, she is aware of the issues most likely to cause tensions with her Fine Gael counterparts.

The main ones to date have included the questions around staffing for small schools, and the consideration of capital assets in how student grants are assessed, particularly those of the farming families that the larger coalition party counts so strongly in its support base.

But there must doubtless, too, be a political temptation to hold back on releasing some of the yields of the country’s slow economic reversal of fortunes in the 2016 budget rather than next year’s, assuming that the nation is not called on to vote in a new Dáil before the current one’s term ends in a little under 18 months.

Whether the electorate will be more wary of auction politics or not next time around, a Labour minister who could announce months before a spring 2016 general election that she is to authorise smaller class sizes, or the restoration or restructuring of middle-management supports in schools would do no harm to the chances of bucking last May’s local election trouncing for the party.

Again, however, voters and other parties will be quick to remind them of how Mr Quinn promised days before the 2011 election that he would oppose student fee increases and grant cuts — only to introduce both. And former party leader Eamon Gilmore’s infamous ‘Labour’s way’ or ‘Frankfurt’s way’ declaration would surely also be raised.

Nonetheless, she also promises not to be slow to make tough political decisions, or to shy away from issues that might not be popular with Fine Gael or their voters.

But her political mettle will probably be hardest tested, in her early tenure at least, by how she deals with the teacher unions. Like the proposed Junior Cycle Student Award — of which they oppose numerous elements — it will be an early form or continuous assessment, long before the terminal exam of a general election for her and her party.