Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. Again, my party supports the Bill, in principle. We will work with the Minister and his officials in as constructive a manner as we possibly can as this Bill makes it way through the House.

I have an issue with the Bill in that, as has been outlined by other speakers, the relationship many students and parents have with schools is a financial one. A disproportionate number of conversations that principals have with parents and that teachers have with parents and students are about money. If that is the basis of a conversation one has with a school because of a voluntary contribution, book money or any other moneys that are perceived to be owing, be it at primary or secondary level and notwithstanding the fact that free education is reputedly a constitutional right, this impinges on one's capacity to have a proper, full or empowering conversation about one's child and his or her development in the school. Regrettably, asking for a voluntary contribution is in the Bill. We should be working our way towards there being no voluntary contributions because the State should properly finance our school system. In other jurisdictions in the European Union and across Europe, such voluntary contributions are banned. The Labour Party has a Bill that proposes to ban voluntary contributions that will come towards the House next week.

If one's conversation as a parent is constantly a reminder, subtle or otherwise, about the necessity for a voluntary contribution or book money to be paid, is one more or less likely to find oneself at the school gates? Is one more or less likely to put oneself forward to become a member of the parents' association? Is one more or less likely to stand for a position on the board of management? Is one more or less like to attend parent-teacher meetings? I suggest, and most people will agree with me, that if money is an issue or if this transactional relationship one has with a school is disproportionately large, then one is less likely to engage and less likely to discuss one's child in terms of development and education, how to help one's child at home, how to read to one's child at home, how one can improve a child's oral language skills, improve literacy or how to engage with the system when one's child has a diagnosis about which one has concerns. Unfortunately, the conversation comes back to the book money or the voluntary contribution etc.

It is far too expensive, in a society that calls itself a republic and one that has a Constitution that underpins the right to free education, to send one's child to school.We have spoken about uniforms. County Derry is close to the Minister's constituency. In the Six Counties, school books are free because a determination was made once upon a time that school books should be free and no parent of a child in the North of Ireland pays for books. It would cost the Exchequer €20 million to provide that at primary level in the Republic. I believe it is not just a financial issue; I believe the Department is horrified at the suggestion that it would engage itself in the day-to-day management of schools. That is the real reason because it wants to allow the patron bodies to maintain the power and autonomy. This Bill comes from a good place. What the Minister is trying to achieve is that parents and students feel more empowered and greater partners in the education system and in their school life. That is to be congratulated and supported. That is what we want to do.

There is a wider issue about whether we tinker with the system or radically overhaul and improve it. Based on my experience as a school teacher and a principal, I was having too many conversations with parents about money. In the context of a DEIS school in an acutely disadvantaged area, even when the book rental scheme was available for all children and it was much cheaper for them to avail of school books than for any other child, having to ask for €60 impinged on my capacity to talk to that parent about other issues that I should have been talking about. Where a parents' association believes that it is fundamentally a fundraising association, it cannot deal with matters of policy and procedure that it should be promoting and thinking progressively about how the school is managing itself, thinking long-term about the school community. How anyone can feel that they are playing on a level playing pitch in the school community if they do not have the ability to make a voluntary contribution, regardless of whether the school has a progressive and open-minded view as to who can afford and who cannot? If one feels as if one cannot afford to contribute, that will impinge on the way that one will engage. This could be the beginning of a conversation on how we fund our schools, how our schools are managed, and the way we view education as a public good, and not something to be purchased. We should not have an expectation that parents' associations fundraise, that voluntary contributions are collected and that books are paid for. Other societies have made different value judgments about education and they have cleared the conversation about finance to one side because it has nothing to do with education and they have maximised this beautiful relationship between the teacher, child and parents and the school and money has no place in this conversation. If this is the beginning of a road to achieve that, we are all for it and the Labour Party will support it, but it is worthy of us to have the conversation. I cannot expect the Minister to say he totally agrees with me, and has a bag of cash to change the way we have always done things overnight. I accept that, but if we are enshrining in legislation an understanding that there will always be a voluntary contribution, that is a failing.

If we are empowering on one level but accepting this transactional relationship on another, we are not achieving as much as we could have. I appreciate the good place that this is coming from. The power imbalance has been there in the past and the legislation is trying to address that but, as other speakers have rightly said, there is a bigger conversation to be had about how the school system is funded, the way the Department is willing or unwilling to engage in the day-to-day management of schools, the way the system is organised in the North of Ireland and how we could replicate that in the South and having a deeper and more profound vision of how education can lift up, set free and liberate every child in the land. It should never be relegated by a conversation about money.