One welcome element of this year’s budget is the further extension of the free books and materials scheme which had been announced last year for primary schools. From September 2024 the scheme will also include 210,000 first, second and third year post-primary students. The announcement means that, from the start of the next academic year, almost 800,000 children and young people in the State who attend non-fee-paying schools will have free textbooks up until the end of junior cycle. It is to be hoped that the logical completion of this process – the extension to senior cycle – will follow soon. Minister for Education Norma Foley indicated in her post-budget briefing that this is indeed envisaged.
The additional expenses associated with Ireland’s supposedly “free” education system have long presented a significant burden for parents, especially for economically marginalised families who may be forced to go into debt as a result. But removing school books – the costs of which are estimated at over €310 per secondary student – from the equation is more than just a temporary cost of ling measure. It represents tangible and long-sought progress in the drive to make universal access to primary and secondary education truly free.
In recent years, book rental schemes, set up by parents to share textbooks by passing them on from one class to the next, played a significant part in reducing costs at primary level. These schemes still have an important role to play by encouraging best environmental practice and getting the best value for money. A longstanding refrain from parents has been that the list of required textbooks changes too often or that editions are revised too quickly, preventing them from passing books down. Another complaint is that there are too many single-use workbooks which cannot be handed down at all. These issues have been the source of controversy in the past, with parents arguing they were being taken advantage of, despite denials that this was the case from publishers and from those responsible for curriculum changes. Now that the Department of Education is effectively becoming the main customer for schoolbooks, it will be interesting to see whether it uses its market power to drive down overall expenditure on behalf of the taxpayer. That may turn out at some point to be a question for the Public Accounts Committee.
The new scheme may not capture the full complexity of education in the 21st century – the place of tablets and other e-learning devices remains to be addressed – but it is a significant contribution towards the reduction of child poverty in the State and is a further step towards realising the commitment first made almost 60 years ago by Donogh O’Malley that every child in Ireland should have the right to a free education.