Ms Colette Kavanagh:

My name is Colette Kavanagh and I am the principal of Esker Educate Together national school in Adamstown. There is a deep appreciation among teacher and principals that parents are struggling with the rising cost of sending their children to primary school. School communities are constantly struggling to come up with innovative ways to reduce these costs to parents and yet to ensure the school itself remains solvent and keeps up-to-date with the newest innovations. It is generally felt, as the two previous speakers said, that primary schools are seriously underfunded and the boards of management have no option but to go back to the parents to fund-raise. The capitation in primary schools is far lower than that in secondary schools, yet it costs the same to heat, run and maintain a building be it a primary or second level school.

We accept that primary schools are overstretched due to underfunding yet we recognise there are current restraints on public spending. Principals and patrons can and do make efforts to lighten the load for parents as much as possible. Both previous speakers discussed the book rental scheme. That is the single most efficient way to help to reduce costs to parents. Any textbook that is not a workbook, that is a book in which children do written work, is purchased in advance by the school, using the book grant scheme and parents pay a quarter of the cost for that year. After four or five years, we buy a new stock of books. It has the advantage that we buy in bulk so that the costs are reduced. When publishers bring out another edition, we are at an advantage because we have the stock of books and every child has the same book for four to five years. Work parties of teachers and parents get together, cover the books and maintain them. It is a way that parents can be involved in schools, without asking them to pay. It does not cost money to volunteer.

We would encourage schools to work as far as possible to implement this low cost book scheme for parents, through careful management of the book grant for schools. The books grant itself is used to support the buying of books or the renting of book for parents who cannot afford to buy. It is also used to help to buy in schemes at the beginning of the year and to support the cost of running the books scheme, replacing lost or damaged books or covering the books. With the renewed emphasis on literacy in schools, the book grant is essential to enable schools to purchase sets of books to do lift off to literacy or read and recovery initiatives that schools have been asked to do. Any reduction in that grant would materially affect school's ability to make improvement in their literacy as required by the literacy and numeracy strategy. It would also be helpful to schools if the books scheme grant was paid in June of the previous year so that a stock of books could be available to the school to begin in September.

Parents still have to purchase books. They get the book list well in advance and by September they usually have bought the books. Many schools are re-examining the educational value of many of the workbooks. We are trying to reduce the number of workbooks that are used in schools for educational as well for economic reasons. Some of our parent teacher associations run a book club apart from the book scheme which encourages parents to pay in on a monthly basis, similar to a Christmas club, and at the end of the year, they have paid for their books in June. The PTA buys in bulk with the money parents have paid in advance.

Other contributors have raised the issue of the materials money. Parents have to pay to rent books, for personal accident insurance, the cost of materials, class stationery, art, photocopying and so on and schools find it is harder to collect the money for these sundries.. We find that parents buy the books from the book list, but the more we put books on to the book rental scheme we find it more difficult to get the money in from it. It is now common practice for a number of parents to pay this charge for materials in staged payments, perhaps a monthly payment or a payment per term. Perhaps it could be formalised at the beginning of the year that parents could chose to opt to pay for materials yearly, monthly or by the term, so that they do not have to talk to the principal or negotiate the terms of payment.

Educate Together primary schools do not have a uniform, but parents must still clothe their children and buy shoes and coats. The initial outlay of buying an expensive school uniform in September does not exist for our parents.

Irish primary schools have a history of fund-raising by parents. As we all know, this may no longer be viable in communities where families are overstretched. In my school, the majority of our children come from international families, and the fund-raising ethic, so part of the norm in Irish schools, is unknown to our parents. They do not realise schools need to fund-raise. I will not say they resist it, but they find it a very unusual thing to have to do. Consequently, it is more difficult for us to raise funds among our parents. Educate Together advises that schools do not fund-raise in September and any fund-raising that is necessary should be strategically planned throughout the school year.

Some schools raise money through an annual voluntary contribution, others do this monthly and others run what they call "small change Friday" whereby parents send in loose change each week, which is a bit messy but works for some schools. We hope that any such contributions are strictly voluntary and that there is neither pressure on parents to contribute nor reminders sent to individual families in respect of these voluntary contributions.