The former Secretary of the Department of Education, Dr Don Thornhill, has warned against complacent assumptions about the standard of Irish education. He claims that data do not support the common perception of the education system as internationally "first-class".
Writing in the ASTI publication Issues in Education, Dr Thornhill, now chairman of the Higher Education Authority, points out that per capita spending on primary education is the lowest in the EU. And only 47 per cent of Irish people aged 26-54 have completed upper secondary education, - significantly below both EU and OECD averages.
This is a "very clear legacy" of what another contributor, Dr John FitzGerald of the ESRI, describes as the 20-year delay before "the policy of education neglect" by successive Irish governments was reversed in 1967.
Dr Thornhill cites OECD projections showing that "despite the clear evidence that we are making considerable progress in closing the gaps", the overall education attainment levels of the State's population of working age would still be below EU and OECD averages by 2015, unless there was an improvement in participation and completion rates.
Dr Thornhill stresses that such projections have important policy implications.
They point, in particular, to the need to increase participation from those groups which "have hitherto been excluded from second and third-level education. They also make a case for a significant effort in second-chance and adult education".
Dr FitzGerald argues that static or falling student numbers in the future will pose new challenges for the Irish education sector.
He suggests that "it will be more a question of maintaining the current commitment to education than undertaking significant additional investment".
Because of the demographic changes, resources are becoming available to tackle the problems of a relatively small group of children with multiple educational disadvantages, who have to be assisted at an early age.
Dr FitzGerald says that unfortunately too many of these resources have been directed in the recent past to improving the pupil-teacher ratio for middle-class children and others who do not face major problems.
"For the future it will be essential that these new resources be targeted where they are most needed. Managing this change will require considerable skill, as it will entail a redirection of resources away from high-profile, politically popular areas towards the more disadvantaged. "Failure to adequately tackle this problem in the coming decade would not only constitute a serious injustice, but it would also place an albatross around the economy's neck for the future."