Seanad debates

Thursday, 16 October 2003

Order of Business. - OECD Education Report: Statements.

 

10:30 am

Photo of Brian HayesBrian Hayes (Fine Gael)

With the permission of the House I wish to share my time with Senators Henry, McHugh and Feighan. Perhaps the Cathaoirleach will indicate when my time is concluded.

This is an important report and it is important that the House debates it, but I wish to raise one point. We heard a good deal in the debate about benchmarking ourselves against other countries – we are doing better than Germany or Spain in some areas, but not doing as well as other countries. We are benchmarking ourselves as an education system, and the OECD has done it as well, by comparison to other systems, yet we refuse to benchmark our own schools. I raise the issue of performance in secondary schools in particular. This is a thorny issue, one teachers and many people in the establishment do not wish to address, but parents want to know more about what is going on in classes and how their schools are doing. That is very important. We need to establish what is best practice, what is working in some schools and not in others.

Unfortunately, our education system is dominated by a view that everyone should get the same amount of funding. Funding should be directed towards the schools that are failing. Those schools need additional support and if that means having some kind of objective criteria on the performance of the school and the outputs of children, so be it. I make that point because we spent much of the time in the debate benchmarking each other against other international systems, yet we will not extend that principle to our own school system. That is a fundamental hypocrisy that needs to be challenged.

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