Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

She was joined by the Green Party, which warned voters of Fianna Fáil's "broken promises" on education and promised in its turn to deliver an extra €1 billion in funding. Why would the Minister and her coalition partners have made such promises if they did not believe the schools needed the money? Now, from the safety once more of Government, these promises have become a commitment to more of the same: more modest increases in capitation, which get eaten up by rising annual costs; more of a "free" education system that is only partially funded by the State; and more inequality between schools which are able to canvass parents for money and those which are not able to do so.

The primary management bodies have expressed this in-built inequality in stark terms. In a recent letter, they stated:

The lack of realistic capitation and ancillary grants means that almost all schools will be sustained only by their community fund-raising efforts. This is socially divisive. Newer schools or schools in less advantaged areas are unable to match the fundraising capability of those in well-off areas. It is unfair and unwise that children are disadvantaged in this manner.

What this means, in bald terms, is that a school in a well-off area which can afford to raise €90,000 in one year can be a "digital school" with the best of everything while a school in a disadvantaged area, even getting extra funding to pay for extra reading tuition and to subsidise school tours, simply does not have this option.

Our Constitution guarantees the right to an education. Nowhere does it say the quality of that right depends on how well off are one's parents. Under-funding of schools for basic equipment has become such a fact of life that retail business has moved into the vacuum. The private sector has spotted a lucrative niche in the form of voucher schemes for computers and PE gear, so we have computers provided by Tesco and footballs provided by SuperValu.

It is extremely disturbing that children are being used as marketing agents by supermarkets, which exploit the lack of equipment in schools to get parents to spend a considerable amount of money in their outlets. For example, a basic desktop PC worth €525 is the equivalent of €232,400 worth of Tesco receipts. A football which costs €11.70 to buy off the shelf is offered by SuperValu in exchange for €3,190 worth of vouchers. This is what our children are worth to big business, but is it what they are worth to us?

Voucher schemes that depend on high levels of private consumption privilege a certain type of customer and, in turn, a certain type of school. As well as being inequitable, the chronic under-funding of schools' basic needs is extremely inefficient. Instead of being the teacher, human resources manager, innovator and leader that our schools need and deserve, principals are semi-permanent fundraisers. What other public service requires its managers to pack bags in the local supermarket or to organise cake sales to keep on the lights?

Our principals and teachers are paid for their skills and talents in leadership and education, yet much of their energy is used to compensate for a lack of funding for the day-to-day basics they need to do their job. More fundamentally, what does this reliance on fundraising tell us about the perceived value of education as a public service? It is hard to believe that education is a real priority for this Government when it will not even give enough money to schools to keep open the doors and keep on the lights. It really is as simple as that.

The Minister will tell us how much money the Government has spent on education in the past ten years, but will she tell us why schools cannot make ends meet? There will be excuses, many of which we have already heard. One is that the Minister has prioritised children with special educational needs and disadvantaged children. Those children also need schools which are well-equipped, warm and safe. They also need principals who are not run ragged from raising money that too often is also needed to purchase psychological assessments in the private sector.

The most vulnerable children in schools have the right to be cared for and respected in the education system. It is not a privilege that can be doled out at the discretion of the Minister, and then used to justify the under-funding of basic necessities. Another excuse is that more children are coming into the education system, thus placing demands on resources. Yet, if we are to produce the scientists, engineers and researchers we need in the knowledge economy, from where exactly are they to come? We need graduates, but they do not just materialise when they are 18 or 21.

Primary education is the cornerstone of a knowledge economy. It is the first crucial rung on the ladder that allows us to reach further and higher. As such, we should look extremely closely at how well the primary system allows children to climb that ladder. Just as pre-school allows children to maximise the benefits of primary education, attainment in literacy and numeracy by 6th class is the most reliable predictor of junior certificate results. Achievement in the junior certificate is, in turn, a reliable indicator of whether a young person will complete the leaving certificate. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the stagnation in literacy and numeracy levels in primary schools is reflected in a school drop out rate that has hardly changed since the early 1980s.

Ireland needs to become a knowledge economy, but that knowledge is built up brick by brick. Research and development investment, while extremely important, means nothing without students to exploit it. We cannot afford to leave children behind in our crumbling, over-stretched schools for want of the vision to see them in university.

The Labour Party tabled this motion because we do have that vision. There is nothing more important to Ireland at this moment than the skills and ingenuity of its citizens. The future of employment in Ireland depends on how we educate our children today. We will not be able, nor do we want, to compete on the basis of a low-wage economy. But we must be up with the best in the world when it comes to competing on the skills and training of our workforce, and its ability to link research to enterprise.

Last year fewer than 7,000 leaving certificate students gained an honour in maths. That is too small a pool from which to draw all the professionals in science, IT, energy, technology and medicine who will be in demand in the knowledge economy. We cannot leave it too late to think about our future or about our children's future. Education is good in itself, but it will also be our most important asset on the global stage. Let us not be short-termist about this. Investing in education is the most reliable investment a government can make. That investment is repaid many times over in the quality of our communities, in the quality of our democracy and in jobs.

This is why it is difficult to understand the reluctance on the part of the Government to make the leap in investment necessary to unshackle our schools from worries about money and to allow them to be ambitious for the future. The Minister will, no doubt, refer in this debate to straightened circumstances in the Department of Finance. This is why she reneged on a much-publicised promise before the election to reduce class sizes. Instead, the extra teachers will be deployed to teach the thousands of new children flowing into the system.

I have news for the Minister. The children will keep coming; approximately 100,000 of them over the next decade. Paying for their education should not be a zero-sum game. The goal of Government should be to improve progressively education for all children, not to only make such investment as barely to keep pace with change. This is the mindset that has landed us with schools which are over-crowded as soon as they are built and schools whose play areas are quickly filled up with prefabs because no one in the Department thought to join the dots of housing development and the arrival of new families.

Let us not be under any illusion that it is economic to educate our children in temporary structures. According to the Minister, last year the Department of Education and Science spent around 5% of total investment in school buildings on the rental of prefabs. Taking first and second level together, I estimate this to be approximately €32 million. This is an annual cost, and would go a considerable way towards meeting the modest cost of increasing the capitation grant.

I could go on. For example, the National Educational Welfare Board receives only enough funding to tackle the most vulnerable cases, and not to fulfil its original mandate to prevent absenteeism and early school leaving. The National Educational Psychological Service is so overstretched that some schools have to appeal to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul to pay for private assessments for children who need them. This Government is reaping what it has sown in the economy, and there is less money than there was in the recent past.

It may even be necessary to make trade-offs if we are to make the kind of investment that will bring education to the level enjoyed by other EU member states. The bottom line is that those countries famous for their progressive approach to education, and especially early childhood and primary education, did not produce such fine systems by chance. They did not build schools from extra money they happened to have lying around. They made a choice. They decided what mattered to them. It is not sufficient that we depend on the goodwill of our school leaders, teachers and parents to compensate with tireless energy and commitment for what we deny them in funds and working conditions.

Fine words about our education system are well and good, but true priorities are revealed through action and the willingness to pay for it. When the tough decisions need to be made, will anyone on the Government side of the House have the vision to radically change the way we invest in all schools, for all children? Our schools need to be able to open our children's eyes to what they can achieve, and what they can become. We need them to see that we value them and are ambitious for them, and for that we need schools that reflect how important they are to the future of this country.

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