IPPN

Published: 11 March 2009

Source: Irish Independent

It has become one of the most contentious issues in education. Every year, the taxpayer shells out over €100m in subsidies to fee-paying schools.

As education suffers severe cutbacks across the board, there has been a growing clamour for these payments to be curtailed.

Why, say the critics, should the ordinary taxpayer fork out for the education of pupils at Blackrock College, for example?

The famous school in south county Dublin received just under €4m from the State in payment for the salaries for teachers, making it the top-earning private school in the country.

Just down the road, St Andrew's College, which has counted the children of rock stars and plutocrats among its pupils, received €3.4m in state hand-outs. Mount Anville, the famous girls' school in south county Dublin, received $2.4m.

When special needs classes are being slashed and book grants for poorer students axed in ordinary schools, it is hardly surprising that subsidies to private colleges are under the spotlight.

On the face of it, the case against state subsidies to the fee-paying sector seems clear-cut. But the issue is not as simple as it seems.

While schools such as Blackrock and Clongowes attract the headlines, there are other middle-of-the-road institutions who have a much more mixed intake.

Some Protestant schools in rural areas charge fees, but take in pupils from a wide variety of social backgrounds.

The fee-paying schools themselves warn that a sudden withdrawal of funding would cause chaos and actually add an extra financial burden on to the State.

The fee-paying sector has led something of a charmed life in Ireland, and there is no doubt that that this has benefited middle income earners, who value private education.

As a result of the subsidies, private schools here tend to charge much lower fees than their English counterparts.

To take one example, students at St Gerard's School in Bray, one of the most exclusive schools in the country, pay €6,100 per year. A comparable school, Westminster School in London, has fees of €21,246 per year.

The lower fees are explained by our system of government subsidies.

So what would happen if these payments were abolished?

Arthur Godsil, principal of St. Andrew's College, recently warned that the withdrawal of the subsidies would lead to a dramatic rise in fees.

As a result, many parents, who might already be struggling to pay fees, would have to enroll in non fee-paying schools, resulting in much greater costs to the taxpayer.

Richer parents could still pay, of course, but thousands of middle-income earners would fall back on the State. This argument seems to have been accepted by the Minister for Education, Batt O'Keeffe, and previous holders of his post.

In a written answer to a question by Labour TD Mary Upton last Thursday, the minister stated: "In the absence of fee-paying schools and the enrolment of all pupils in the non-fee paying sector, there would be subsequent additional costs and teachers would still have to be paid."

Rather than axing the private school subsidies completely, the Government is likely to chip away at them gradually, as it tries to slash costs.

This has already happened in the most recent budget. Teachers in fee-paying schools are now paid by the department on the basis of a pupil-teacher ratio of 20 to one, compared to 18 to one last year.

The Budget also axed support services grants to Protestant schools, which were worth a total of €2.8m per year.

While he acknowledged that there were complexities concerning some fee-paying schools, Peter McMenamin, General Secretary of the Teachers Union of Ireland, says continuation of the current system of subsidies is "morally inexcusable".

The TUI boss argues: "All of these schools by definition operate discriminatory selective procedures, whether that be by excluding minority ethnic students or those with special educational needs, or more blatantly, by pitching the level of fees so high as to put them out of reach of all but a minorit

"Funding should be dependent on a fair and open admissions policy.''

Supporters of the subsidies, on the other hand, argue that a withdrawal of the payment would not only add millions to the State's education budget, by forcing parents to look to non fee-paying schools -- it would also hit poorer Protestants, many of whom have no alternative to a fee-paying school, subsidised by the State.

Our present system of payments has its origins in the birth of the free education system in the '60s.

At the time the State could not provide full support for free Protestant schools. So those schools continued to charge fees, with a system of grants for less well-off pupils.

Bandon Grammar School in Cork is one of a number of Protestant schools which receive pupils from a wide geographical and social background.

While the school charges fees, up to 50pc of pupils receive grant assistance, because they cannot afford the full charges, and 12pc of pupils do not pay any fees at all.

"For a school like ours, the payment of teachers' salaries by the State is an absolute necessity,'' says principal Ian Coombes.

"We are already being hit heavily by the budget cutbacks. If the teachers were not paid by the Government, a school such as this could not keep going.''