Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

This Bill will ensure an annual education impact study is published in advance of the budget each year. It will prevent unilateral decisions being taken on school staffing without any examination of the impact of these changes on the schools concerned. The Minister for Education and Skills admitted in early 2012, following his cuts to DEIS schools, that the current procedure in place was bad and that he had not assessed the full impact of that decision. This Bill will put in place a new system that will ensure greater strategic planning in how decisions are taken and also bring greater transparency and openness to the budgetary process. It will also allow schools to appeal such decisions where they are found to have a disproportionate impact on them.

The Bill will put in place a system whereby the Minister for Education and Skills will carry out and publish an annual education impact study which will examine the effect the Minister's decision to reduce a school's annual resource allocation will have on schools. The study will have to be completed in a timely fashion within two months from 30 September of each year so as to allow schools ample time to submit an appeal against reductions which would have a disproportionate impact on them. The study must include the names of schools affected and the impact the resource allocation reduction will have on those schools. It must also specifically include details of the effects the resource reduction will have on students and remaining staff, each area of education affected and the effects on the general functioning of the school. The Bill also provides for a mechanism whereby the principal of each affected school can appeal the Minister's decision to reduce his or her resource allocation and gives the school an opportunity to set out a number of grounds upon which it can base an appeal. An appeal can be lodged up to four weeks after the Minister has

published his or her annual education impact study.

The objective of this Bill is to ensure that education resources are protected in the coming years. It is also a response to what we have seen in budgets introduced by this Government since it came into office where there have been a series of cuts in the education budget. Subsequently, there have been row backs by the Minister and as I pointed out, actual admissions that mistakes were made and the full impact of the measures undertaken was not fully appreciated at the time. As the Minister of State with responsibility for training and skills is aware, my party's pre-budget submission ring-fenced education funding, mental health services and disability services. There are many other areas we would have liked to have protected but we ensured those three areas were protected. We specifically protected education because we believe it must be the pathway on which we build the future of this country.

We all acknowledge that education has taken severe hits in its budgets in recent years but there must come a time when the Minister must look at the impact this is having and the impact of any further cuts. That is why we ring-fenced the education budget in our pre-budget submission so that the capacity of our teachers at preschool, primary, secondary and third and fourth levels to continue carrying out their job is not diminished. Our young people only get one chance to go through the education system and we must ensure that those coming through our education system at a very unfortunate time in our economic history do not suffer as a result. If one looks at the successes our country had in the past, one can see they were very much built on a good education system. That system was built on the moves towards free primary and secondary education and State-funded third level education. That helped bring many jobs to this country and ensure we had a high level of graduates and a well-educated workforce across the country.

In recent years, we have seen some slippage in respect of that. We have seen figures published recently which showed that numeracy and literacy attainment levels in the education system in Northern Ireland were higher than our levels. We have also seen how our third level institutions are dropping out of the top 100 education institutions globally, which, again, is due to funding to a large extent. We must make a decision as to how we go forward. A large part of our future success will be down to the prioritisation of our education services.

That will determine the prospect of success for our country and whether our people can achieve their potential.

If this Bill is implemented, the Minister for Education and Skills will no longer be able to make decisions on potentially damaging cuts to front-line education services without first assessing the impact of these cuts. The Bill will ensure an annual education impact study is published in advance of the budget each year. The Government has talked at length about strategic planning for policy decisions but this approach has been absent from decisions on reducing school resources. The Government also promised to bring greater transparency and openness to the budgetary process yet this has not happened. The Bill provides an opportunity to bring transparency to the education budget process. It seeks to address the total lack of strategic planning on school staffing, which resulted in a series of bad policy decisions in budget 2012 and budget 2013 and cuts to the further education and training sector. Last year, the Minister for Education and Skills made a number of decisions which resulted in the loss of the ex-quota allocation for guidance provision, cuts to small schools which put their viability at risk and the loss of a significant number of DEIS posts which were only partially reversed. Following these decisions, he admitted that the procedure was bad. He said in regard to his decision to cut 428 DEIS posts:

I made a mistake. I got it wrong. When the full impact of what we did was brought to my attention I realised that we hadn't acted on the full information that we had and we hadn't analysed the full information available to us.

Similarly, in budget 2013 the Minister announced a two point increase in the pupil-teacher ratio for post-leaving certificate schools from September 2013. Following criticism that the change would result in a significant loss of teacher posts and a reduced number of places, he responded by stating:

However, I have met with the chief executive, Jacinta Stewart, of the City of Dublin VEC and I've asked her to give me a complete impact analysis across the City of Dublin VEC...and she's going to come back and provide me with that and we'll then look to see what the impact of all this is.

We cannot continue with a situation whereby the Minister makes decisions without analysing their impact on the schools concerned or else only carrying out an analysis after the decisions have been made. This is no way to approach important budgetary or policy decisions and it is hugely unfair to the teachers and students concerned. This Bill would put in place a process of strategic planning before decisions were made which would allow schools to appeal decisions having a disproportionate impact on them. Under the current system schools report pupil numbers in October and receive notice of their allocation for the subsequent year after Easter. There is often a delay of four or five months between the agreement of the Department's Estimate and notification being sent to schools. This Bill would require the Minister to produce an impact study within two months of 30 September each year.

As was seen early last year with the DEIS cuts, national decisions are being taken without a proper examination of the impact of cuts on individual schools. The decision in budget 2012 to remove the ex-quota allocation for guidance provision without an assessment of the impact on the provision of counselling services was irresponsible and wrong. A damning new survey from the Institute of Guidance Counsellors showed that services have been decimated since this measure was introduced and that the most disadvantaged schools and students have been hit hardest. There has been a 51% reduction in one-to-one counselling since September 2012, with disadvantaged schools experiencing a much greater reduction in guidance hours compared to fee paying schools. Last year the Minister stated that schools would be empowered to decide for themselves how best to allocate resources following the removal of guidance provision but the truth is that schools are struggling to provide a proper counselling service.

In a similar vein, the Minister now argues that PLC schools and VECs will have time to plan how best to manage their resources in advance of the cut to teacher numbers from September 2013. In our Private Members' motion this week, we outlined the impact of these cuts on the further education and training sector. The impact of these cuts should have been assessed prior to budget 2013. While the two point increase in the pupil-teacher ratio for PLC schools will result in the loss of 200 whole-time equivalent posts, up to 500 non-permanent part-time teachers may be lost from the sector as a result. This is in effect a 10% cut to the teaching force in PLC schools. It is ironic that at the same time as these cuts were being discussed in the House yesterday, the Cabinet met to discuss how Ministers could assist job creation. How did the Minister, Deputy Quinn, explain his decision to reduce the capacity of the further education training sector to provide the type of courses necessary to cater for emerging niches in the jobs market? If he had carried out an impact analysis in advance of his decision instead of wondering about it afterwards, he would have realised that the capacity of further education and training colleges will be diminished, with the result that many courses will have to be cancelled. Specialist and cutting edge courses depend on part-time teachers from the business and professional world who can impart their expertise to students. These are the hours which will be most affected by the cuts because they are not permanent.

Unfortunately, it appears the only impact assessment carried out on any of the measures introduced in the budget was on the political impact they would have on the Government. Having been scarred by the experience of DEIS and, more recently, the lack of thought put into SUSI, the first question asked about the budget was how it could minimise the number of people chasing the tails of Ministers afterwards. The Minister introduced measures to ensure parents would not object by targeting the further education and training sector instead. The students affected by these cuts are adults who come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds or have not been well served by the secondary education system.

The two point increase in the pupil-teacher ratio is unprecedented in its harshness. It is like lobbing a hand grenade into the further education and training sector. If this Bill had been adopted previously, the requirement to carry out impact assessments would have persuaded him to discard many of the measures he introduced since he entered office. He would share our policy position of protecting the education budget as a key platform for the future. I do not doubt he will find fault with particular aspects of the Bill but we need a system in which the impact of policy is assessed in advance rather than after the fact.

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