IPPN

Published: 01 December 2008

Source : Irish Times (Opinion)

HEAD TO HEAD:The €90 million made available each year to fee-paying schools means that parents who have to collect Tesco tokens for school computers are subsidising schools with private swimming pools, writes Kieran Allen. Halting the payment of capitation funds to fee-paying schools strikes a populist chord, but would create more problems than it would solve, writes Brian Hayes.

Kieran Allen: Yes

OVER THE past few months, we have been subjected to a ferocious campaign against the public sector, led by Fine Gael. In the cacophony about a "bloated, inefficient public sector", it may come as a surprise to note that in 2005 Ireland had the third lowest public expenditure as a percentage of GDP in all the OECD countries.

But why let facts deflect from a good story? Fine Gael's defence of bankers and the wider corporate elite has become a little more difficult of late. The strategy of scapegoating the public sector helps to take the spotlight away from how the State supports inequality. Nothing better illustrates Fine Gael's inconsistency than its support for State subsidies to private fee-paying schools - even while attacking waste in the public sector.

Each year, €90 million is made available by the Irish taxpayer for private fee-paying schools. Parents who collect Tesco tokens to get the odd computer for their children's classrooms generously donate through their taxes to schools with private swimming pools. Despite our claims to becoming a "knowledge society", only 7 per cent of our second level schools employ a laboratory attendant to help children master scientific experiments. But our taxes are used to give the children of richer people a head start.

Two spurious reasons are advanced for this social injustice. One is that the State pays teachers in private schools and, if the funds were withdrawn, there would be an exodus to publicly funded schools. Some proponents even suggest that private schools are reducing the burden on public schools.

But why not extend the same logic to private security for the wealthy or even to their chauffeur-driven cars? By giving grants to private security on gated communities or to millionaires who employ chauffeurs, we might also "reduce the burden" on the police force or the public transport system. No one has yet made that argument because it would represent such a blatant subsidy of inequality. But why should education be treated differently?

A second justification used is that some of the money supports Protestant and Jewish fee-paying schools, and it is therefore a matter of protecting minority groups. Leaving aside the small matter of whether children of different religions should be educated separately, why stop at these two religious minorities? Ireland is now a multicultural society, and on the same logic, every religious group which provides an exclusive education for its upper strata should also be subsidised. Yet, strangely, the Fine Gael spokesman on education has not pursued this logic but has instead called for the "segregation" of non-English speaking children in our schools.

The spurious justifications cannot hide the core issue. Despite all the rhetoric about a meritocratic society, the wealthier sections of society want a head start. In a 100 metre sprint, they want to start at the 30-metre line. They are aware that nine out of the 10 top "performing" schools for boys who gain entrance to university are fee-paying. And as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it, they want to transfer their money capital into "cultural capital" to perpetuate structures of inequality. What is particularly galling, though, is that they want assistance from poorer taxpayers who already - before the cuts - put up with sub-standard schools.

Contrary to impressions, private schools do not offer a "better" education - they offer a different one. They are less subject to the public scrutiny of a rights-based discourse and can employ a variety of mechanisms to exclude the educationally disadvantaged. High fees alone exclude the poor, but other mechanisms can also be employed against those who try to scrimp and save to gain entry for their children. These include interviews with culturally biased questions, or selection systems which prioritise those who used expensive private feeder schools. By excluding children with educational difficulties, and by using the State subsidy to cut class sizes, these schools are almost guaranteed a better performance in examinations.

But State money also gives them scope to invest in facilities which encourage a different, hidden curriculum. In contrast to the rote learning which is encouraged in overcrowded public classrooms, the private schools have more resources to develop the "whole personality" and encourage confidence and "leadership skills". In doing so, they reflect the deep class divisions in our society whereby some are trained to become managers who can conceptualise and lead, while others are destined to become "operatives" who are permanently bossed around.

The real issue is not merely the €90 million per year subsidy given to private schools but the need for a quality, State-run public education system that treats all children equally. We can only achieve that by taking some of the vast fortunes from the wealthy through taxes or by more radical means. And Fine Gael, of course, would never dream of that.

Dr Kieran Allen is head of the school of sociology at UCD

Brian Hayes: No

WHEN EXCHEQUER finances take a nosedive, as they have under this Fianna Fáil/Green Government, there will always be calls for "those at the top" to pay their way and for certain groups to feel the pinch. Fee-paying schools seem like an obvious target. I can understand why some people would question why schools such as these receive much-needed taxpayers' cash while the Government introduces savage cutbacks affecting the most disadvantaged in the country.

It sounds like the easy option, but cutting funding to fee-paying schools will actually cost us all more in the long run. By abolishing State funding to the 44 private secondary schools in the country we will end up putting more pressure on the backs of our already creaking State schools, as there will be an exodus from fee-paying schools that will either close or hike up their charges.

For proof of this, we need look no further than what happened when Protestant schools had their funding slashed in last month's Budget. Since the introduction of free second-level education in the 1960s, schools with a Protestant ethos receive State funds under a different mechanism than other schools in the State. This was due to the particular nature of the population they represented and resulted in the Protestant block grant being established which covered the payment of capitation, tuition and boarding grants.

however, the decision in the budget to slash the existing service grant to these schools will now endanger the viability of many smaller Protestant schools, particularly in rural Ireland.

There are 21 such schools in the country and the removal of important grants, allied to a radical increase in the staffing schedule, will mean that some schools could face a very difficult future. As these Protestant schools have pointed out, the Budget cuts will, at the least, result in fees sky-rocketing, and this will result in students leaving, thus putting more pressure on non-fee paying schools.

The net cost of providing extra funding to State schools as a result of the students' exodus will financially far outweigh the State funding received by private schools. Alongside this, we will see more overcrowded classrooms, greater competition for already-stretched State school resources, and damage done to students' potential to learn and the State's ability to produce high-quality graduates.

In other words, it costs us all to cut funding to private schools.

As well as this, if you believe in parental choice, which has been a cornerstone of our educational system, then protecting all schools is essential in defending that choice and diversity. Many fee-paying schools were established with funding from religious orders or denominations as a means of protecting certain religious values. The foundation of some of these schools was inextricably linked with the protection of minority faiths in the State, and are an expression of that individual choice that lives on to today.

This belief in diversity is backed up by the constitutional difficulties that would arise in removing funding to fee-paying schools. Article 42 recognises parents' role as the natural educators of their child, and their free decision to use any school, public or private, to educate their child.

Parents cannot be forced to send their children to one type of school over another. It is clear that the Constitution does not allow restrictions on a parents' freedom to choose the best form of education, in their view, for their child.

When talking about school funding, one of the main problems is that the one-size-fits-all approach of school funding makes it more difficult for schools with social problems to survive because the existing level of provision is spread so thinly across the entire sector. The current model of school funding is out-dated and takes no account of the real pressures that exist in some schools.

The only way to change that is for a root and branch restructuring of school capitation and current funding structures so that schools in difficulty can obtain more support and more intervention. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are at risk of being virtually ignored by the system unless major investment is put into facilities in their schools. We must focus on this, and never accept the idea that some schools are allowed to fail, be they fee-paying, community college or a voluntary secondary school.

The Government has got it completely wrong in the education budget - all sides agree on that. Their attacks on frontline