In little over 30 years, Ireland has moved from a country where only 20 per cent of the population completed second-level education. Now over half enter third-level education. Perhaps, during a period of rapid expansion, little energy was available for looking at issues of reform. The same structures, the same yardsticks, are still in use. It is time to assess how well suited they are to the challenges ahead. Is there too much of a cosy consensus?
Ireland has a unique structure. We have a highly centralised Department of Education and Science that controls, in extraordinary detail, the resources available to our schools. At the same time we have schools that operate as independent republics.
At school level, this has produced a number of weaknesses: there is no strong tradition of critique either internal or external; schools rarely have outside partners who can bring the fertilisation of fresh ideas; schools offer poor staff development opportunities.
In the face of more and more pressures on young people, schools are being asked to take on new roles and cope with complex issues such as substance abuse, sexual relationships and civic responsibility. However, they are ill-equipped to deal with these challenges. Schools find that their resources are over-stretched in managing day-to-day affairs and have little time for innovation and development. Support services are thin on the ground and poorly integrated into the school setting.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Department too has serious weaknesses and is something of a dinosaur at a time of rapid change. It is bogged down in detail, right down to the repair of a school roof or the replacement of a boiler. It has hopeless planning capability, leaving rapidly developing suburbs to cope in chronic facilities. Its policy making is incremental, tacking on something new to respond to the latest pressure point. It has no proper system of evaluation for the programmes it has in place. It relies on a model of consensus for policy development which slows reform to the pace of the slowest.
The result is that the debate is often a rather sterile one about inputs rather than about the challenge of securing better outcomes, particularly for weaker pupils. The recent alarming statistics of poor literacy at primary level is a good example of the failings. Four years ago, the Department adopted a policy of eliminating serious literacy problems at the early years of primary school. In the intervening period no serious effort was made to develop policies that would achieve this objective.
When a study discovered that the remedial education system was hopelessly over-stretched and delivering no real improvement for children in disadvantaged schools, the only response from the Department was to set up a group to revise the guidelines for the programme. There is nothing wrong with the existing guidelines. What is needed is to put substantial resources into the management, development, delivery and evaluation of this service. This has not happened. There is no strategy for tackling literacy.
Several changes must be made if we are going to confront the challenges in education: we need to introduce proper quality improvement strategies at school level; we need to devolve power out of the Department to where it can be used more creatively to tackle problems; we need to develop services to provide staff development and technical support to those working in schools; we need to challenge consensus in policy-making
Serious quality improvement strategies at school level need resources, strategies and evaluation. There is no tradition of this in our schools. The Department has been unwilling to sit down as a partner and recognise that some of the difficulties at school level need extra resources. Teachers have been extremely hostile to evaluation because they fear that they will be unfairly judged. A new model must allow the school a considerable degree of freedom in identifying the objectives it pursues, in choosing strategies and in access to resources. The other side of this coin, however, must be a commitment to full openness with parents and prospective parents, and a willingness to compare results across schools and engage in peer review.
All of the evidence points to serious area-based problems in education. In disadvantaged urban areas, serious reading difficulty in primary school is twice the national average and early school-leaving almost three-times the national average. Individual schools acting alone cannot address these problems successfully. A new model of local education development is needed which can build partnerships across schools and with agencies operating in the wider community. A wide range of the services can then be called upon to support children in difficulty. There is a rich well of support and experience in the wider community that can and must be tapped. The Department must be willing to devolve funds to both schools and to local education partnerships. It must be willing to trust them to develop appropriate programmes, and judge by results.
In Ireland, w spend less than 1 per cent of teacher payroll on training and development. Progressive companies would spend more than five times that amount. Principals and teachers do not have the time or the technical support to plan interventions best suited to the needs of pupils. Ironically, much of the present in-service training is done at the expense of time with pupils (six days this year).
While we have over 30 agencies to help companies develop, we have none to support schools to deliver quality programmes. This weaknesses runs the risk that good teachers will leave to go to other careers where they see better development opportunities.
The tradition in education is that review groups and boards are composed almost exclusively from appointees of key provider groups in education. This balance should change. Policy development is not simply an extension of industrial relations. We need a more radical critique to pervade policy making at every level.
Richard Bruton, TD, is the Fine Gael spokesperson on education and a former Minister for Enterprise and Employment.
