Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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65. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the plans to increase investment in education per student to at least a level equal to OECD average; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [8428/25]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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My Department’s voted estimate for capital and current expenditure for 2025 stands at €11.9 Billion. This represents an increase of over €3.2 Billion or 37% since 2020 and builds on significant increases in recent budgets. This is the third largest budget across Government, and the largest ever investment in our schools. This indicates the strong commitment to investment in education by this Government.

Budget 2025 provides an increase of €712 million in core current funding to my Department's Vote, as well as over €360 million in core capital funding. An additional €120 million is also being provided as part of Cost of Living supports and €140 million in Ukraine related supports. It also provided €30 million of additional financial supports for schools that allows for a 12% increase in school standard capitation rates from €200 to €224 per student in primary schools and from €345 to €386 per student in post-primary schools. This builds on previous investments in school capitation funding and bring the total increase in rates to 22% over the last two successive Budgets.

My objective is to continue to deliver on the priorities outlined in the Programme for Government and to continue to support the students, staff and families in the education sector.

The Deputy refers to the OECD average investment in education, as set out in the annual ‘OECD Education at a Glance’ report. This report uses GDP as the base against which to compare investment in education across different OECD members. As the Deputy will be aware, senior academics and other independent analysts have raised questions regarding the usefulness of GDP as an accounting standard for Ireland and its distorting effects on measures such as spend per capita on education. A special measure GNI-Star (GNI*) that has been calculated by the Central Statistics Office and used in the National Development Plan, 2021-2030, to help in analysis of the Irish macroeconomy and excludes these distorting factors. When using GNI* the education expenditure in 2021 stood at 5.5%, which compares favourably to the OECD average of 5.1%.

To assist with this, my Department published a "Note on use of GDP and modified GNI as a measurement of public expenditure on education in Ireland" in October 2022 to assist users of these statistics to understand this issue, which is available on the gov.ie website.