At the time of writing, the most read story on the Irish Times reads as follows:
Children across the country are called out in class due to non-payment of voluntary contribution charges at post-primary level, a new report by the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (SVP) has revealed.
Numerous necessary items, such as lockers and journals are withheld from students whose parents do not pay the charges, which adds to stigma – said the report, titled Closing the Gap – What is needed to end Voluntary Contributions in Post-Primary Schools.
On the face of it, these are extraordinary claims: That a child should be singled out and shamed because his or her parents did not pay, or could not afford to pay, a voluntary contribution to their taxpayer funded, entirely free school, is shocking. If true, it is shameful. It is not surprising that it is the most read story in Ireland’s most reputable newspaper.
The problem is that the story doesn’t make sense. And it appears as if, once again, an Irish media outlet has taken a questionable piece of work from an NGO and published it as if it were gospel.
First, consider how reliable the study is:
Almost 1,500 parents (1,447) responded to the anonymous online survey, and 87 per cent of those said that they have had to cut back or delay spending on other areas of the family budget to pay the post-primary voluntary contribution charge.
First of all, note that this is a survey, not an opinion poll. The difference with surveys and opinion polls is that surveys are “opt in” – that is to say, anyone can take part and anyone can choose not to. This particular survey was conducted by Grant Thornton on behalf of the SVdP, and there is no methodological report about how the results were weighted, or even if they were weighted.
Therefore, there simply is no way to know if the shocking figure – that 87% of people are cutting back on necessities to pay a voluntary charge – is true. But there are many reasons to be sceptical about it. The number one reason is response bias: Those exercised about voluntary contributions are simply vastly more likely to respond to a survey about voluntary contributions than those who are not. There is no evidence in the Grant Thornton report that this response bias was accounted for, or noted.
The second extraordinary element to the story is the claim that things are being withheld from students on the basis of parents failure to pay the voluntary contribution. This is a very serious claim, but it is never substantiated.
No school is named. No parent is on the record. No principal was asked to comment. It is a story with a lot of holes.
In actual fact, these claims were only made in 4% of the total responses to the survey – but note the first paragraph of the Irish Times article above. It says that this is happening “in schools across the country”. This claim that such denial of resources is a nationwide occurrence is based on a tiny fraction of responses to an opt-in survey, with not one single confirmed incidence of it actually having happened. Despite this, the claim is the single most-read thing on the Irish Times website at the time of writing.
There is a difference between news which is entirely false, and entirely misleading: It is absolutely true, or at least true in so far as can be ascertained, that a small number of parents claimed that their children were denied access to services on the basis that they did not pay a voluntary fee. It is absolutely false to claim, as the Irish Times does, that the survey “reveals” that this is happening across the country. The survey reveals no such thing.
A reasonable reader would therefore be entirely mislead – if they trusted the Irish Times – into believing that something that is claimed to have happened in a few isolated (and shameful) cases is in fact widespread across the country.
This is worth remembering, the next time you hear a pious lecture about fake news and trustworthy sources.
All of that said, it should be noted that it is an embarrassing situation that a large number of schools in the country are so reliant on voluntary contributions from parents just to keep their schools operating. The voluntary contribution is, in effect, an extra tax: It is money that goes to subsidise state services, but it is collected on a regressive base, unlike other taxes. Rich and poor pay the same, and it hits the poorest hardest.
The St. Vincent De Paul have a good point when they say it is unjust. But that is no excuse for slandering schools in general, or for the Irish Times’ sloppy and misleading reporting of this story.