Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
Link to this: Individually | In context

Question 89: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the reason the OECD reported that in 1994 Ireland spent 5.5% of GDP on education yet in 2007 the OECD Education at a Glance report indicated Ireland spent 4.6% of GDP which places us in joint last place in a range of thirty OECD countries; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [33417/07]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context

Between 1995 and 2004, in real terms (allowing for inflation), total public and private spending has increased here by 74% at primary, second and further education levels and coincidentally by 74% at higher education. At primary and secondary levels, this scale of increase was the second highest of any OECD country while at third level it was 6th highest.

So, total spending grew faster, here, in absolute terms than in most other OECD countries over that period. The OECD in its recent report has remarked (page 202): 'In Ireland, the strong growth of GDP hides a significant increase in spending on educational institutions when spending on education is considered as a proportion of GDP.' It should also be noted that the OECD report to which the Deputy refers relates to 2004 and hence does not capture the extra investment that has been put into Irish education in the past three years. In fact, the Department's expenditure for this year was €8.6 billion — €2 billion more than in 2004 and the estimate for 2008 is over €9.3 billion.

The OECD Report also showed how Irish students are performing significantly better than those in other developed countries on a whole range of important measures. More recently data published by OECD from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has confirmed that, in 2006, Irish students continued to perform above the OECD average in Science and especially in Reading. In Mathematics, students in Ireland were average.