Ms Áine Lynch:

Thank you, Chairman. Several members referred to the status of book rental schemes and how that cost can be allayed. My personal view is that if the school book publishers all closed down tomorrow and no new primary school books were published, I am not sure the education system would change at all. This is because, in the first instance, the curriculum was written to facilitate a lesser degree of reliance on school books. The bottom line, however, is that there are already enough books in the system. When one considers the number of children who finish primary school every year, the question arises as to where their books are going. Schools must have some means of retaining those books within the system.

The fundamental difficulty in this regard is the regularity with which the assigned reading list changes for individual classes. I am referring here not only to what the book publishers are doing but also the tendency of some teachers to change the reading list for their class, sometimes year on year. That has to stop if schools are to be in a position to offer a workable book rental system. Any such scheme requires consistency in the books that are used each year. As I said, there are probably enough books in the primary system to implement any model of school book rental scheme. I am not even sure why there is rental element to it; if the books are there in the schools, they can be given to children. Year on year, however, parents are purchasing yet more books and one is left wondering where this huge pile of books is accumulating. It does not seem to add up.

It does not take too much thought or innovation to work out how to keep the books we already have and recycle them within the system. Any such scheme should not be too difficult to initiate because of the massive numbers of books already in circulation. Coming from the English system, I am constantly amazed at this phenomenon of new books being purchased every year. We often hear about a revised edition of a particular textbook replacing the older version on the assigned book list. Again, coming from the English system, it was my experience that in such cases the teacher would instruct pupils with the older edition to open on page 42 and those with the newer version to turn to page 44. That was all the variation in teaching that was required to accommodate a class where pupils had different editions of the same text. There are lots of issues blocking the changes we are discussing but, in my view, there are enough books in the system to facilitate any scheme that might be introduced in the future.