Millions for free school books... but no-one to clean the loos!

WELL, there’s a turnaround in just a few decades!

It’s not so long since 1966 when, for the first time, second-level education was provided free by the Irish State.

We don’t always get things right in this country, but this latest benefit is a truly marvelous initiative. Children and teenagers have started the 2023/2024 school year with free schoolbooks, workbooks and copybooks. Schools no longer need to collect money to cover textbook rental. Parents no longer have to budget for school materials.

In fact, parents won’t even have to buy copies or, in some cases, even pencils or sharpeners!

Ireland was always known as the Land of Saints and Scholars and here we are, in this small, relatively remote, wave-battered outpost of Europe, not just providing free primary and second-level education, but free textbooks, workbooks and copies too. And, in some cases, the grant may even stretch to providing free pencils, erasers and sharpeners!

The funding for this is €96 a head, which, I’m authoritatively told, is grand for schools which have had schoolbook rental systems in place for years. Schools will own the books, which will be loaned out to pupils for the school year.

Now for the catch. Or, even, the catches.

For some schools - perhaps those which may not have an existing school-book rental system in place - it is possible the €96 a head per pupil may fail to completely cover the cost of everything in the first year of this new grant.

The Department of Education has already pre-empted this, saying that it recognises the total book grant provided may not be sufficient to cover all related classroom resources.

Schools, it states, must communicate with parents and inform them of the related classroom resources covered under the scheme.

However, just this week I heard - and while this is anecdotal, the source is reliable - that there are a number of well-heeled parents already up in arms because their local school has requested a very small top-up from them to help cover the full cost of educating their child.

In one case, I was told, the €96 per capita failed to completely cover the cost of the required large range of new textbooks, workbooks, copybooks, pens, pencils and so on.

Alas, disappointingly - though, it must be said, quite in line with the appalling sense of entitlement that the generous Irish welfare State seems to be engendering in some quarters - the parents concerned were utterly outraged at being asked to make what I’m told was a very small contribution to their children’s education. I mean, come on!

As my source commented, the old adage applies; the more you do for people, the less they appreciate it.

Question: Do we, as parents of the 560,000 or so pupils enrolled in around 3,230 primary schools appreciate the true enormity of this gift from the Irish State to families, through this decision to pay for more or less everything our children need to enjoy a good education?

Have we as parents considered applauding, acknowledging, and expressing our appreciation of the mammoth benefit to us of this decision which means we no longer have to pay for textbooks, workbooks, copies and even, perhaps, pens and pencils?

And are we not prepared to step up to the plate and help out with whatever small donations may be required in some instances to cover the full costs?

Next question: and the eventual answer to it will be quite interesting. Now they’re getting the textbooks, the workbooks and copies for free, will families ensure their children respect them and look after them properly? Or - because they are getting them for free - will they allow their children to misuse or damage them? Will they carefully repair pages torn by their child – or will they march into schools demanding new copies of a torn textbook?

What do you think?

Meanwhile, another issue is raising its head. Schools might be approved to dish out millions of euro worth of free academic materials, but ironically many of them have nobody to clean the toilets.

Covid is once again rampaging through this country. Schools are not currently funded for both caretakers and cleaners, and it cannot be denied that schools – at the very least the larger one – most certainly need both. In what other institution in the country which daily houses several hundred people is a cleaner not provided as a right?

Schools which have 20, 30, 40, or 50 rooms currently have to decide between having a cleaner and a caretaker. 

Students should rightly be expected to pick up their own litter, collect their dropped bread crusts and sweep their own classrooms. However, who is going to clean all those toilets, all those floors, all those corridors, sensory rooms and other specialised educational spaces?

The government provided funding for cleaners during the pandemic. But now the pandemic is supposedly over – even though the dogs in the streets know the country is coming down with the virus again – this grant is no longer available.

The Department of Education will tell you that it provides funding to primary and post-primary schools in the free education scheme by way of per capita grants, including the Capitation Grant to cater for day-to-day running of schools - heating, lighting, cleaning, insurance, general up-keep, etc – and that it provides an Ancillary/School Services Support Fund (SSSF) to cater for the cost of employing ancillary services staff.

But not specifically cleaners, apparently.

So the crucial question remains: Who will clean the toilets?