Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We are discussing the reopening of our schools and I would imagine that, all over the country, educators are listening in to what we have to say. Not only that, they will also be looking at where it is we are saying it. I want to direct the point not necessarily at the Minister, who has no control over this, but more at the political establishment itself. We are speaking here in an auditorium with several hundred spare seats and with a distance of 20 m or 30 m between us. All over the country, there are teachers teaching in classrooms that are overcrowded, placing their health at risk, and we should never step away from that fact. It looks arrogant and it gives in to the belief that there is one rule for some and other rules for others. We need to step away from that because we are not demonstrating any leadership.

The reopening of schools was the minimum expectation we should have had as a modern society. However, one of the things I have been disillusioned by is some of the commentary about the rush on the road to normality, as the Minister put it in her comments. We know full well what normality looks like for many people in our schools. Surely we should have a bigger vision than a rush to return to a scenario where we have one of the highest pupil-teacher ratios in the OECD. Our normality looks like an antiquated education system that was designed for mid-20th century learning and is now out of date. Surely, if the Covid pandemic has taught us anything, it is that there should not be any rush to go back to normal.

That lack of ambition for the education system has been compounded by generation after generation of a political establishment that has sought to see our education system as an afterthought. We need something better. We need a broader vision of something more substantial and of how we not only bring our children back to education, but how we can educate them in places that are exceptional, in buildings that are suitable, with teachers we are paying appropriately.

One of the things I have raised an eyebrow about in the last couple of weeks, particularly the last couple of days, is the very welcome decision to remove calculated grades and the historical parts of that from the leaving certificate results next week. We are now being told that disadvantaged students will not be disadvantaged as a consequence. While that is certainly very welcome in the context of the leaving certificate, let me be very clear that, from the very moment a child enters our education system, they are met with an incredible degree of inequality. A student coming from a poorer household will start primary school with lower language skills.

We heard yesterday that CSO data show that one in five children in this country is living in conditions of forced deprivation. Those children go through the same ranks of primary and second level education. They go through first, second, third, fourth and fifth year at the same level of inequality. We then expect them to sit the leaving certificate in the knowledge that they are the children who did not have access to a nutritious meal, standard provisions in terms of their clothing such as a warm coat and, in modern times, Wi-Fi access. These are the children who were at the forefront in terms of tech inequality when students had to remove themselves from class. This is not fair.

Education in this country does happen in isolation. We cannot separate out the environment in which a child is educated from the system in which he or she is being educated. It is grotesquely insulting to believe that combating disadvantage in this country stops at the removal of historical grading from the leaving certificate, because it does not. If the Department of Education and Skills takes the view that child deprivation and poverty has nothing to with it and it takes a hands-off approach in that regard, I disagree with it. The Minister should not tell us that is fair because it is not.

We need a broader vision for what education and combating disadvantage in our schools looks like that extends beyond the realms of us every year enabling a scenario whereby a couple of children squeeze through the ranks and we then convince ourselves that that is okay. It is not. Those seeking evidence of this need only look to The Irish Times yearly feeder schools list which shows that students who attend private schools or schools in wealthy areas are the ones who get access to the universities, with students in low-income communities being disproportionately impacted by that. Education, poverty, inequality and disadvantage are intrinsically linked. We have removed one small component of that to make the situation better, but not to a satisfactory level.

I want to speak about fairness, which is an issue that has come up over the past while. Yesterday, the four unions representing teachers appeared before the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response. Teachers and schools have done an incredible job. It is lamentable that some of the public commentary that has taken hold has not been respectful to the role of our teachers, special needs assistants and school secretaries. I acknowledge the work done by them but I do not want only to acknowledge it. In every staffroom in this country there is a level of unfairness because some teachers, despite that they are all doing the same job as their colleagues, are being paid disproportionately on the basis of the year in which they commenced teaching. A vision for education that extends well beyond the rush to return to normality would result in fairness, not only in terms of how we educate our children and the conditions in which they engage in education but how we pay our teachers.

Another exceptionally important component of our education system that has come to the fore during the pandemic is our special needs assistants, SNAs. They are incredibly valuable to society but we are not appreciating them. If we are to really acknowledge the role of the SNAs in our schools, then over the course of this Thirty-third Dáil, a vision for a better education would be a professionalisation of the SNA community, paying them appropriately, improving their working conditions and standardising the role across schools such that an SNA in one particular school does not have an entirely different role from an SNA in another school. It is fundamentally important that we have actual vision for education that extends beyond returning to a 20th century antiquated, outdated mode of education.

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