On the tiny island of Muck in the outer Hebrides in Scotland there is a one-teacher primary school. It also has just one pupil. The Scottish Department of Education believes that this school is so vital to the future of that tiny, marginalised community that it has recently spent £100,000 on completely refurbishing the school building.
Irish National Teachers' Organisation general secretary Senator Joe O'Toole tells this story to illustrate the different levels of commitment to small, rural schools in Ireland and other similar European countries.
The 18 children who attend Leabgarrow National School on Aranmore island in Co Donegal are in an altogether less enviable position (see panel). This is the kind of government neglect of small schools which the Minister for Education, Micheal Martin, pledged again at the INTO conference last week to put an end to during his period in office. The INTO's 1997 survey of primary schools' funding came up with some startling statistics on the continuing problems of such schools in the middle of the Celtic Tiger economic boom. There were still around 35 schools with outside toilets. Nearly 130 did not have a phone; 17 per cent still had classrooms in prefabs, most of them more than 20 years old. In almost a third of the schools there was not enough money to get them cleaned and swept daily.
Nearly half did not have any kind of "general purpose" room for physical education, concerts and plays, assemblies and parents' meetings; 59 per cent did not have a principal's office and 76 per cent of them did not have a separate library. Amazingly, 76 per cent of them also did not have hot water in the children's wash hand basins.
Every year the INTO publishes a list of seriously sub-standard schools with fire or safety hazards, rats or other vermin, rotting windows or doors, serious overcrowding, outdoor toilets and ancient prefabs. These range from the 200-year-old Protestant school in Donegal which inspectors concluded would not be fit for cattle, let alone children, to the Gaelscoil in Cork where the top floor of its totally unsuitable building is inaccessible because the roof has caved in. The union concedes that after reaching near-record length in the "fiscal rectitude" years of the late 1980s, the lists have shortened in the 1990s after first Niamh Bhreathnach and then Micheal Martin started to have some success in persuading finance ministers to release significant funds for primary schools (see graph). However, spending on primary education has continued to rise more slowly than on both second and third-level education.
The really bad, shabby, insanitary national school may now be the exception. However, primary education remains very much the "cinderella" sector. The latest OECD figures show that Ireland spends less per primary student than any other country in western Europe, north America or Australasia. Irish pupil-teacher ratios are the worst among 12 comparable European countries. Ireland is also third - behind only Mexico and Turkey and ahead of every other advanced country - in the large imbalance between the amount it spends on third-level education in comparison to what goes on primary schools.
A 1994 comparison between disadvantaged primary schools in Limerick and Derry found that the schools in the Southern city received poorer funding, had many fewer computers, televisions and other equipment, had larger classes and fewer promotion prospects for teachers than its Northern counterpart.
At the last election the political parties appeared belatedly to have woken up to the resource starvation of Irish primary schools. Fianna Fail promised greater allocation of resources at pre-school and primary "since early educational intervention will prevent many social problems and huge public expenditure later on". There was concern right across the political spectrum about the thousands of low achievers who were dropping out of second-level schools.
Declan Kelleher, a principal from Corofin, Co Clare, puts it more graphically. It is "immoral and undemocratic" to underfund primary education, he says, when it is probably the only opportunity for children from the most disadvantaged groups, the ones who are most likely to drop out later, to get any decent schooling. The real problem in primary education is now less the handful of woefully inadequate schools. It is the whole system of funding primary schools, whereby the meagre Department of Education capitation grant - £127 per pupil less than in second-level schools - has to be stretched to cover an almost impossible number of demands.
Gerry Malone, a principal in the Cooley peninsular in Louth, estimates that a typical four-teacher, 100-pupil school would receive £5,000 per year from the Department of Education, which is then topped up by another £1,000 by the "local contribution", usually raised through a parish collection. In the past year a new £3,000 grant to cover small repairs has helped a little. However Malone says they still need the parents to raise up to another £3,000 per year through sponsored events, social evenings and cake sales. He says without the parents' efforts all the Department's grant would cover would be insurance, heat and light - not even cleaning. A school like his would not even be able to buy art paper or drawing pins, let alone the computers and videos that are standard items in schools a few miles across the border in Northern Ireland.
Micheal Martin has started to move. He has pushed up the budget for primary education by nine per cent for the current year, with the amount spent on building having gone up by 15 per cent. At the end of May, a consultant will report on a new transparent "points system" for awarding funds to sub-standard schools, which will avoid the farce of several Limerick schools getting last minute decisions on their building applications in the run-up to last month's by-election.
