Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

For most of last year, a steady stream of announcements and leaks came from Marlborough Street. An enormous amount of time was spent telling journalists how progressive reform was under way in a new era for Irish education. The problem through all of this is that it all added up to nothing more than a statement of intention rather than concrete action.

Budget 2012 was the moment when the warm words and self praise could no longer cover up the reality of a Government whose education policy is deeply regressive and almost designed to maximise the damage inflicted on the most vulnerable pupils. On the day spending for this year was revealed, the Minister, together with most of his colleagues in government and many of his backbenchers, put out statements praising the plans for education. His own statement led with the direct claim that, "Front-line services in schools are being protected". For schools and teachers in every part of the country this statement was an insult. It said that for the Government home school liaison, language support, smaller classes for the most disadvantaged communities and many other activities in place for over a decade are now no longer front-line. The same goes for the career guidance and counselling service in second level schools.

A budget, which Fine Gael and Labour claim will protect front-line education services, will shortly end all support for guidance and counselling in schools. In September, there will not be a single teacher in Irish second level schools paid by the State specifically to help young people cope with the incredible and rising pressures they face in school and in their future lives. If helping a teenager who is finding it difficult to cope and does not know what to do with their life is not a front-line service then nothing is.

The teachers who deliver guidance and counselling in our schools carry a heavy work-load and perform a vital role for our society. The Minister and the Government took a decision to single them out in this budget. A service built up over 40 years has been dismissed as a mere optional extra. It has been adopted without even basic steps being taken to examine its impact on schools and pupils. Not one single piece of advice is available to schools as to what they should do now. The cold hard message of the Government is to say to schools, "It is not up to us; you handle it".

This is a dishonest cut that was proposed specifically so that it might be slipped in without too much controversy. The Government thought that leaving the headline pupil teacher ratio in place would be enough to make people believe its claims. This fell apart immediately and the Government then resorted to the insulting claim that all it was doing, as the Taoiseach told the House during Leaders' Questions, was giving schools staffing flexibility and local autonomy. The Taoiseach said this decision was all about giving schools what they had been looking for. The Department sent a circular to all schools that contained the soothing words, "In this way schools will have discretion to balance guidance needs with the pressures to provide subject choice". No doubt, this evening we will hear more of the same from the Minister and he will attempt to claim there is no need for guidance and counselling.

Let us put aside all of the nonsense and look at the facts. This is a cut that was demanded by no one and was on no one's agenda. The Government's own documents, as well as our pre-budget proposals, showed how to achieve the budget figures without this cut. It first emerged as a possibility in the Minister's own review of his Department's spending, which was finalised on 9 September. The proposal, which was later put through a public relations filter, is to be found in its stark and brutal simplicity in page 15 of the Minister's document. In September, he explicitly raised what he terms, "the option to terminate the dedicated staffing allocation for guidance and counselling". There was nothing about providing it from other allocations, as is now being claimed. In fact, he explicitly talked about redeploying guidance teachers. Last September, he said this would raise difficulties and "could take at least two years to achieve". If it was going to raise difficulties over two years, its implementation in one brutal move this September will raise many more. The budget documentation allows for no transition period or flexibility. These 700 teaching posts will be removed in their entirety in September.

Ministers and desperate backbenchers have been repeatedly claiming that the service can be protected within the staffing quota. Hiding behind the complexity of second level staffing, they have claimed that principals will have discretion to continue to employ guidance counsellors. This does not stand up to even basic scrutiny. Every school in the country has already filled its staffing quota with teachers who are allocated to specific subjects. Many have slightly more teachers than the strict pupil teacher ratio allocation in order to provide required subjects. There is no space within the pupil teacher ratio allocation to maintain the guidance and counselling service. No doubt, the Government will claim this space will be created by retirements. What this ignores is that schools will have no option but to replace retiring teachers with subject specialists. If, for example, a science teacher is retiring the school must replace the teacher with another who can teach science. Most teachers teach subjects that are required for the curriculum. Schools must provide for the core subjects and must provide a minimum number of other subjects. The claim that they will have enough discretion and flexibility to absorb 700 posts in September is either cynical or ignorant. Whichever it is, the devastating impact is clear.

There is no doubt about the legal obligation of schools to provide for the set curriculum. What is less appreciated is the legal obligation to provide guidance. In preparing the Education Act as Minister for Education and Science, I decided to include a provision concerning guidance. I did this for a range of reasons, the most important of which was the guidance works. I looked at the evidence and could see that guidance teachers were performing a vital role for schools, pupils and the wider society. In particular, I could see that pupils from disadvantaged schools benefit most from the service, a fact confirmed by subsequent studies. When reducing the overall second level pupil teacher ratio I also implemented an increase in the number of guidance and counselling posts together with improvements in areas such as in-service training in this field. I chose to keep guidance and mainstream allocations separate because every scrap of evidence showed that guidance is not optional. It is core to the work of schools.

The fact that Ireland has now one of the world's highest school completion rates is, in part, due to the work of our guidance counsellors. It was the experience of many other countries that drop-out rates increased during prosperous times and it was a core objective of ours not to have that happen here. The expanded guidance and counselling service was charged with taking a lead role, and it did this. Equally, it is central to helping pupils in these more difficult times, working with them to negotiate the more complex training and higher education fields.

One of the most cynical and disingenuous things about the education cuts targeted at those most in need is that part of the saving has been earmarked to fund the new literacy and numeracy strategy. The comprehensive review of expenditure confirms this in a number of places. Programmes that have been proven repeatedly to deliver better educational outcomes are being cut to create space for a public relations initiative. It is more important to the Government to be able to claim credit for things than to acknowledge the work of others.

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