Mr. Gerry Bennett:

I was in a voluntary secondary school during the week that is suffering hugely because it cannot cover its bills. If it was in the VEC or some other system, it would not be in the same bother. Voluntary schools comprise 52% of schools and educate 58% of students. The VECs, now the ETBs, have 35% of schools but only 25% of the students, while community and comprehensive schools which comprise 12% of schools have 17% of the students. There are three ways of funding these schools. Voluntary schools are funded by way of a per capitagrant, that is, per head of population in the school. ETBs receive a block grant from the Department of Education and Skills, while a different model applies to community and comprehensive schools. Where are the disparities? According to the ESRI's report, insurance costs are paid centrally for VECs; the pay of non-teaching staff is covered by the ETBs and so on. There is a list of items for which the voluntary secondary schools have to pay, whereas the State is paying for them in State schools in the VEC sector and also community and comprehensive schools. That works out to be a considerable sum of money.
The ESRI states clear differences are evident between the three sectors. Voluntary secondary schools receive on average just over two thirds of their funding from the Government, while the proportion is much larger for vocational and community schools, with average figures of 90% and 93%, respectively. That is a significant difference in the amount of funding allocated to the schools from the State. The ESRI states it is clear that voluntary secondary schools receive a much lower proportion of funding from the State. That seem to us to be absolutely unacceptable - that children are afforded different amounts of moneys for their education, depending on what school type they are in. The knock-on effect is that 44% of voluntary secondary schools were found to use parental contributions to cover the cost of secretarial services, caretakers, light and heat, which is met by grants in ETB schools. Voluntary secondary schools are at the pin of their collar in trying to pay for light bulbs as they do not receive any extra State funding to meet educational provision.

On one or two final points, the percentage of total funding from fund-raising and the voluntary parental contribution together, 6.14%, shows clearly that the voluntary secondary schools are much more dependent on discretionary payments than other schools. Thus, an average of over 12% of all income in the voluntary secondary schools comes from the parents, compared to 5% in the community schools. Faced with the recent and current economic conditions, this militates even more against the voluntary secondary schools, where parents do not have the funds to up the difference between what these schools are getting and what the VECs and community and comprehensive schools are getting.

The ESRI report has pointed out that the cost of the trusteeship function, what we do and what we are tasked to do under the Education Act - a large amount of work - is not funded by anybody. We are funded from the Christian Brothers with a seed grant, we have some funds that come from the schools for capitation for the students we have and apart from that we look after everything else in terms of the school. According to the ESRI report, the cost of the trusteeship function for the student is €25 per head.