Greg Daly
Ireland’s parents and principals are struggling to keep primary schools afloat, writes Greg Daly
If there’s a silver lining in the Government’s banning oversubscribed schools owned by Catholic parishes from selecting on the basis of religion, it’s that it removed another distraction from the real story in Irish primary education, which is that the State is not doing its job: it is not tackling the fact that more places are needed in Irish schools, and Irish schools are seriously underfunded.
“It was a constant – underfunding was consistent all the time,” says Anne Savage, who retired last week after 23 years as principal of St Kevin’s National School in Glendalough.
“If you can imagine if you’re running a house or anything, if you have something like money issues it colours everything else,” she tells The Irish Catholic. “The priority of what you’re supposed to be doing at school as a principle or for the school’s functioning is teaching and learning, and the underfunding of it is huge.”
Pointing out that before the crash Ireland’s primary schools were funded by the State to the tune of €200 per pupil, but that this was cut to €170, Anne says that a long-awaited rise this year will still leave funding levels far below what they were a decade ago.
Shortage
“No school is getting enough,” she says, “so therefore they have to fall back on fundraising or fundraisers, and fundraisers are your parents’ association, schools, boards of management – it’s a very grey area, but basically as a cohort of parents and as a school body you have to raise money, and whatever you can do you do. You can have your cake sales and your book sales and whatever you do, we’ve done it all.”
Her own school, which typically had about 135 pupils coming from 100 families, has had to raise about €10,000 every year to cover the shortage in funding coming into the school, with, she says, schools across the country being in a similar situation.
That this should be the case might startle people familiar with how the sole economically significant right explicitly indentified in the Constitution is a guarantee that primary education should be free. Article 42.3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann promises: “The State shall provide for free primary education and shall endeavour to supplement and give reasonable aid to private and corporate educational initiative, and, when the public good requires it, provide other education facilities or institutions with due regard, however, for the rights of parents, especially in the matter of religious and moral formation.”
For the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA), representing the boards of management of more than 2,800 schools across Ireland, the effects of the Government’s failure to meet its constitutional obligation could hardly be more clear.
It’s easy to see that our total last year was €39,000 and there’s nothing wasteful, there’s nothing flamboyant, there’s no staff being taken out to dinner…”
In its pre-budget submission for Budget 2020, the CPSMA stresses the achievements of Irish schools but lays down a stark warning about what it believes Government failures will lead to, declaring that it is “gravely concerned that underfunding, administrative overload, and the continuing substitution crises are leading to cumulative system stress across the primary education system”.
“If these challenges are not addressed,” it continues, “then primary education will be undermined with serious consequences for both the Irish economy and Irish society. Improved and sustained investment is needed if we are to address the challenges facing primary education in Ireland.”
Shortfalls in the capitation grant for schools, as Anne Savage says, is something that simply cannot be sustained if schools are to be run.
“These are just rough figures, but if, say for 2016-17 we as a capitation grant got in €26,000. That is to cover everything and anything,” she says, explaining that in her old school such basic costs as heating, lighting, water, and such security costs as monitored alarms, exit lights and fire extinguishers came in at about €9,500, or 36% of the school’s total funding.
“Now, if you take the next section, which is a bit scary – I put this down as office and administration. You’re looking at phone, postage, printing, photocopying, bank charges, and insurance. That comes to €16,000,” she says, explaining that the most basic running and administration costs between them therefore use up effectively the entire grant.
“We’ve to pay a cleaner to come into the school,” she adds. “We’ve to pay wages and for materials, that comes to €4,500, and then anything to do with educational aids, that could be subscriptions, recruitment, anything to do with the school would be another €7-8,000, and none of that is covered in the capitation grant, wherever you draw the line.
“It’s easy to see that our total last year was €39,000 and there’s nothing wasteful, there’s nothing flamboyant, there’s no staff being taken out to dinner, lunch or anything,” she says, explaining that this is the reality of funding for schools throughout Ireland. “If you’re going on percentages, 100% is used up in the basics, the heating and lighting and… the insurance, which is 20% alone,” she says.
Rising insurance costs and reduced State supports have been taking a toll on Irish schools for some time, of course, with the Archdiocese of Dublin admitting last year that about 40 schools across the diocese were in serious financial trouble, with some even having had to ask parishes to bail them out.
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Even without parish help the reality is that the parents of children all across Ireland are doing an immense amount – beyond their taxes, of course – to help pay for their children’s basic education.
“We have to acknowledge what the parents are doing,” Anne says, explaining that sometimes controversial voluntary contributions from parents are a basic part of any school’s funding system. “Our voluntary contribution is not large. It’s €60 for an individual, and a maximum of €100 for any family, whether with three, four, five or six children. So it’s not high by these standards, and we expect quite a good uptake because it is voluntary.”
Even regardless of the contributions, schools need help from parents, she continues.
“The parents have to pay anyway, irrespective of how they do it: they could go and have a sponsored walk and put their names on the sponsor cards,” she says. “It’s a moot point saying ‘we don’t agree with voluntary contributions’ when parents have to organise books of tickets or whatever.”
A lot of schools, explains Brendan Horan, principal of Cahir Boys’ National School in Co. Tipperary, prefer to call voluntary contributions ‘maintenance contributions’.
“Our school has a voluntary contribution of €50 – well, we call it a maintenance contribution. And that’s what most schools will call it, because that’s what it does,” he says. “It pays the bills, because the Government money doesn’t. Like there’s no grant between now and December, and the biggest bills are in November, December, January and February. At least in January and February you do get the capitation, but the money is run out between June and December. That’s why we run the voluntary contributions.”
Schools are forced to seek such maintenance contributions to meet their costs, he explains.
“The board of management can’t run the school at a deficit which means they have to look for money and this is the time of year when it comes in. Every school has to do it because of the cost,” he says.
“We were cut 15% – the equivalent of €30 per head – over three years, in 2011, 2012 and 2013,” he continues. “Ruairi Quinn and Michael Noonan were the ministers responsible, with Ruairi Quinn in Education and Michael Noonan in Finance, and they did it over three years. From a media and public point of view it was done quietly, and the suffering only kicked in about two years after that.”
Our school has a voluntary contribution of €50 – well, we call it a maintenance contribution. And that’s what most schools will call it, because that’s what it does”
National figures point to the impact of this, with the CPSMA having last year commissioned Grant Thorton to conduct an investigation of the impact of this shortfall on Ireland’s primary schools. The accounting and consultancy firm analysed the financial accounts of a representative sample – one in 20 – of Ireland’s Catholic primary schools from 2015 and 2016, and estimated that the total contribution of parents and local communities to schools was over €46 million.
Feeding into this shortfall was not merely the cutting of the schools’ capitation grant by 15% but a rise of 4.5% in the Consumer Price Index, pushing up the running costs for schools, and changes in the nature of education nowadays which requires schools to pay for internet connectivity and information technology maintenance. Small wonder, then, that Ireland’s schools are having to turn to parents and communities in lieu of constitutionally-guaranteed State support.
“While certain schools had had voluntary contributions for luxury reasons, up in Dublin particularly, the rest of us did it out of necessity after that, and it’s at the stage where we’re dependent on it,” laments Brendan.
Original idea
“The original idea was maybe voluntary contributions towards maybe a luxury the school couldn’t afford normally, like maybe an all-weather pitch or something like that, but for the last four years it’s been meeting the bills when the money runs out,” he says. “That’s what it’s been for, that’s what it’s been all about, and parents put huge work into it.
“We ran 10 fundraisers last year, and if we didn’t have the maintenance contribution we wouldn’t balance the books, and we have to balance the books: you can’t run a board of management and not balance the books. And when the pressure was on a few years ago it was really, really bad,” he says, declaring the €8.50 being restored to the grant this year to be “not good enough”.
“At a minimum it has to go back to the €200 per pupil” he says. “At a minimum.”
There is, he says, a strange inconsistency too in how grants are provided to secondary schools – which, after all, have no constitutional guarantee in how they should be provided for.
“Now we always compare it to secondary schools, where the secondary school money has gone over €300 per pupil – ours is at €179 per pupil – but a unit of electricity still costs the same,” he says. “I’ve no problem with secondary schools getting extra funding for their extra subjects and extra materials and whatever they need, but when it comes to the basic running costs of schools they should all be funded equally and that’s all I’d be comparing with.”
Older schools, he says, can have real struggles in paying their bills, not least because their heating systems can be anything but efficient.
“My electricity bill is huge because they wouldn’t allow me to change from electric storage heating to gas or kerosene central heating a few years ago because we were on course for amalgamation,” he says. “So we have electric storage heaters, 24-hour heaters, in operation in our schools. That would be fine if electricity were the cheapest form of energy – we’d actually be in line with all the climate change suggestions – but electricity in itself is the dearest form of energy in a school.
“I can’t turn on a heater half an hour before the children come in and have it warm the classroom – I have to turn it on 24 hours in advance. So that’s going to cost money, I can’t touch it on weekends, I’m dependent on the ESB timers being right, I can’t even go and adjust it and tweak it to be efficient, and it means we have to pay the bills,” he says.
With such expenses, he says, it can be dispiriting starting the school year and realising that the money isn’t there to fund new projects or programmes.
“When you come back in September and say we cannot do this because we do not have the money, that’s the worst start to any school year,” he says. “When you have teachers saying ‘I’ve a new class, I’ve to get new materials,’ and say to him ‘sorry, we won’t have the money till February,’ sure half the year is gone then. That’s why the maintenance contribution is so important.”
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Praising parents councils and boards of management for their work – the role of such volunteers in the Irish educational system is rarely noted, and hardly ever taken into account by those who advocate a fully State-owned-and-operated education system – he says that principals themselves lose a lot of valuable time dealing with funding shortages.
“The primary focus of any school has to be teaching and learning for the children, but if quite an amount of energy is taken up in coordinating fundraising, organising fundraising, collecting fundraising, and counting fundraising, well that’s going to distract from all that other work,” he says.
Acknowledging that a certain amount of fundraising always needs to be done for luxury items, he says that the need to fundraise simply to keep the show on the road has to have an impact on education more broadly.
“You might be able to have more effect if they weren’t being dragged left, right and centre with non-teaching-and-learning activities,” he says.
If quite an amount of energy is taken up in coordinating fundraising, organising fundraising, collecting fundraising, and counting fundraising, that’s going to distract from schoolwork”
Indeed, Anne Savage says that with more than half of Ireland’s principals being teaching principals who tend to teach full-time even regardless of administration duties, having to fundraise is an “undue burden”.
“But it’s the reality of schools that we have to undertake it,” she says. “What other publicly-employed persons have to be responsible for making sure the roof is on their buildings?”
With maintenance contributions having to be sought from the families of children in schools, Brendan says it is in effect an ‘education tax’, and worries that this is a sign of serious problems in Ireland’s education system.
“What I’m seeing with education in general – and I would tie in secondary school and third level in this – is that access to education sadly is becoming economic related,” he says. “Those that can will access it, and those that can’t, won’t be able to access the higher levels of it as they go along. At least with primary everyone goes to primary school, and unless you resource that fully you limit the access for those children at all other levels.”