Imagine, writes Fintan O'Toole, a country so poor that it has no national primary school system. The state doesn't set up schools for children, but leaves the task to parents and local groups.
Teachers and parents spend much of their time trying to collect money for basics like water and heat. We don't have to imagine this country, of course, because - except for the bit about being poor - we live in it. But we are so used to the absurd situation of primary education in Ireland that we forget how crazy it is that one of the most basic tasks of modern states is left to a ramshackle network of over 3,000 private institutions. Maybe we need the even greater absurdity of forcing parents to pay for the water used in the schools their children attend to shock us into realising that we can't go on like this.
Last week, the Minister for Education Mary Hanafin announced "a new State model of community national school". As if finally waking up to the impossibility of the current, largely religious, voluntary system, she outlined the development of a new kind of primary school, one that will be under the patronage of a Vocational Education Committee and "open to children of all religions and none". This is a welcome development in principle but, in reality, it represents a response so timid that it seems to ignore the very problems that have prompted it. The "new State model" will amount to a pilot project of three schools, all of them in the Dublin area. And it is envisaged as an addition to, rather than a reform of, the current system. In effect, even the model will apply only in areas where new schools are being planned and where there is a sufficient concentration of population to make a choice of schools practical.
What is completely absent is any acknowledgment that the current model doesn't work any more. It was based on two assumptions. One was that every child belonged either to the Catholic parish or to one of a small number of other faiths for whom special provision could be made. The other was that the parish could act as an informal alternative to the taxation system, raising money from the faithful and using it to fund some of the cost of building a school and most of the cost (apart from salaries) or running it.
Those assumptions no longer apply. The Catholic parish is no longer, in a more diverse society, an adequate synonym for "the community". The limited role of the State that was built into the system arose from conditions that have long since disappeared. The State, when the system evolved, was the United Kingdom and most Irish people, for obvious religious and political reasons, didn't like the notion that it would be shaping the minds of Irish children. And primary education itself has gone from being a marvellous modern innovation to being a basic provision.
Nor does the system work in practice. The fantasy that primary schools are essentially private institutions to which the State, in its beneficence, contributes some financial support, translates in reality into grossly inadequate funding. The State spends 4.6 per cent of GDP on education - the OECD average is 6.2 per cent. Less of what it does spend goes to primary education than to any other sector - the capitation grant for a child at primary school is not much more than half of that for secondary school. The result is that most schools teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Eighty per cent of schools depend on fundraising, not to acquire extras, but to pay for the basics: heat, light, insurance, telephone, cleaning, and now water. In 200 schools surveyed by the Irish Primary Principals Network last year, the average grant was €25,000 and average running costs were €48,000.
It's not just about money, though. The notion of primary schools as individual, private entities results in a critical lack of management. The State can track every calf born on an Irish farm from birth to dinner plate, but it has no record of the passage of children through the primary school system - where they're coming from, what their needs are, how they get on, where they go to. How could it have, when we don't actually have a national primary system? Meanwhile, at local level, boards of management are asked to deliver a crucial public service without training, resources or support.
Unsurprisingly, they in turn are generally unable to support the school principals whose job of managing, fundraising and in many cases teaching as well, is becoming unsustainable. A report by the Department of Education's inspectorate found "little or no evidence of collaborative approaches to the realisation of plans that involved parents or members of the board of management". Yet members of boards of management find themselves personally liable for everything from damages for pupils abused by teachers to water charges. Their altruism is being exploited merely so that the State can avoid its responsibility to provide an education system. If, when they see their water bills, they all decided to resign en masse, would the Government learn a useful lesson?