This is the first in a series of posts over the coming weeks wherein I – and other writers for Gript – will examine the big areas of Irish life and Government spending – health, education, justice, the economy, and so on – and examine “outside the box” ideas for how things might, and could be changed. This week, we start with education.
To understand how the bureaucracy of the Irish state thinks about efficiency, every voter should really understand something called “Croke Park hours”. Those extra hours worked each week was conceived as additional work – and therefore output – for people in the public sector, introduced at the height of the economic crash. In the case of education, it means that most schools now hold weekly or bi-weekly staff meetings outside of school hours which teachers are expected to attend. But there is little to no evidence that these meetings have improved the quality of Irish education, and much evidence – by way of falling recruitment, and so on – that the extra workload is resented and reviled by many Irish educators: Not for the fact of it, but for the pointlessness of it.
Yet, these hours are vital to the state because they improve the basic “public sector efficiency” rating by adding more hours worked for the same amount of pay.
It was, after all, Sir Humphrey Appleby in “Yes Minister” who noted that in the civil service, “we do not measure our success by results, but by activity”.
This is the mantra, in education and in whole other fields of policy, that the Irish Government appears to live by: We do not measure our success by results, but by activity.
Activity has come to define Irish education policy in recent years: Everywhere you look there is a new curriculum, or a new way of marking and measuring exams, or extra paperwork and lesson plans and inspections for teachers. There is, everywhere, additional focus on classifying students into different classes of learning disability, and hiring more support staff and “teaching assistants”, and increasing the number of people going to third level.
But what has the result of all this activity been? Grade inflation in the state exams. Record levels of unemployment amongst the youth. Falling levels of teacher staffing. An unprecedented number of graduates, and an unprecedented shortage of skilled tradesmen and women. The Irish education system has become a glorified degree factory to the extent that degrees themselves have become de-valued: Nobody serious about a career atop Irish society, these days, would dare arm themselves with anything as worthless as an undergraduate degree from UCD or Trinity.
Against this backdrop, it is worth considering what an alternative vision of Education for the country might look like. Here are some ideas.
De-prioritising third level
The Irish economy has a persistent skills imbalance: it is top-heavy with graduates, while there is a grave shortage of people with manual skills. Re-directing a significant chunk of third level funding into trades and apprenticeships would have the short-term impact of reducing demand and competition for college places and accommodation, and the long-term impact of reviving Ireland’s under-pressure construction and trade sectors. An education system run in the national interest would be eager to produce more plumbers and carpenters annually, and fewer people with degrees in theology or classics, valuable as those subjects are. Alternatively, given the shortage of available “masters” to take on apprentices, this could be done by the establishment of one or two “trades colleges”, where people were specifically trained, and could graduate in, the practical skills.
Additionally, the state should look at abolishing so-called “free fees”, at least for the most well-off in society. This is effectively an expensive subsidy to the middle and upper classes, who already have the most privilege and inherited wealth, and comes at the direct expense of poorer communities with the highest rates of educational disadvantage. Ringfencing this money into providing greater assistance to those most in need would promote equality of opportunity, while disincentivising people from signing onto courses that they are not certain that they are interested in. A student accepting their third or fourth choice course, simply because it is free and they wish to go to University has a vastly higher chance of dropping out, which results in a waste of money for the state and the taxpayer. An alternative approach – though probably even less popular – would be to make college free only to those who get their first or second CAO choice, since it is much more likely that those students are studying subjects in which they are interested.
The objective of policy should be to reduce third level participation, not to increase it, and to increase the number of young people pursuing practical career opportunities in construction, manufacturing, and other sectors of the economy where there are presently shortages, and therefore considerable earning opportunities.
Funding schools fully
At present in Ireland, a majority of non-fee-paying schools require additional funding from parents to survive, because of the state’s persistent refusal to fund schools fully via the so-called “capitation” grant. This is a fixed fee paid per student to each school to cover non-staffing costs like heating, equipment, sports and so on.
The problem with this system is that it specifically advantages the wealthiest schools with the wealthiest parents, at the expense of the poorest schools. Money should be re-directed from either the NGO budget, or savings elsewhere in education, to ensure that no school in Ireland is dependent on fundraising from parents.
A curriculum for the brightest, as well as for the weakest
The new Junior Cert curriculum in Ireland makes most subjects subject to examination at a so-called “common level”. Teachers across the country point out that while this may be of benefit to the weakest students, it is proving very unsatisfactory for those of greater ability – because each class, and each subject, must move at the pace of the weakest students in the room.
In years past, streaming children by ability at second level proved unpopular because of the perception that some children were left behind – but the solution to this has been to create an alternative where many students don’t get the chance to forge ahead. Anecdotally, this is creating behavioural issues, as well as reducing the overall level of learning amongst students. It should be reversed – not to the old “smart kids do latin, dunces do woodwork” formula, but to the old higher and ordinary system that allowed students of ability the chance to prove themselves and allowed students of lower ability to set realistic goals.
Tackling discipline in schools
In recent years, it has become almost impossible to effectively discipline disruptive students in Irish schools. Partly, this is a result of external factors, like the refusal of insurance providers to sanction children being “put outside the door” unsupervised if they have been disruptive in class. In part, because of a shift in attitudes amongst Irish parents who are now more inclined to blame teachers, rather than their own children or parenting, for behavioural issues in class. The result has been a lack of teacher morale, and disruption to students who have to share classrooms with disruptive children. This should be pro-actively addressed by giving schools more power to suspend and if necessary expel persistently disruptive or abusive pupils. Education is a privilege as well as a right, and the state should be prepared to defend the right of each student to an education by acting against those who abuse the privilege.
Exams should test schools, not pupils
In recent years there has been a discernible shift in education policy towards producing students with the correct attitudes, rather than students with the correct abilities. This manifests in subjects ranging from civic and political education, to an overt indoctrination of students on climate issues, to new sex education curriculums that often stray away from mainstream sexuality into esoteric discussions of fringe practices. At the same time, one in six Irish people – most of whom have been through the education system, are assessed by the OECD as “potentially unable to understand basic written information”.
At present, the leaving and junior cert results are understood to be an assessment of the student’s ability, rather than the ability of the teachers. The Junior Cert should be re-focused into becoming an exam focused on basic adult life skills: Reading, writing, understanding mathematics, understanding history, geography, and the legal and political system. These are skills that are vital to adult life, but which many people seem to escape the education system without attaining.
Combining this with correct funding for schools, as above, should also permit the state to enact a form of performance related bonuses for teachers: Those teachers whose students achieve the consistently best results should receive bonus payments above their salary levels, to induce the best performance. Those schools which persistently underperform should be targeted for intervention – though not necessarily punitive intervention.
Overall, there is the possibility of enacting an agenda that reverses the present trend: An education system that focuses not on activity, but on outcomes. That might go against everything the state, and the civil service, stands for, but it would transform the lives of millions of Irish young people. For the better.