Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 23 Jul 1970

Vol. 248 No. 12

Committee on Finance. - Vocational Education (Amendment) Bill, 1970: Second Stage.

Minister for Education (Mr. Faulkner)

I move "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

The purpose of this Bill is twofold. Firstly it enables the vocational education committees to broaden the scope of their activities through formal co-operation and collaboration with other bodies. Secondly, it enables me to allow a vocational education committee which has been dissolved to be reconstituted without waiting until after the next local authority elections have been held.

As the Vocational Education Acts stand at present, vocational education committees are empowered to pay the cost of schools or school facilities only in respect of their own schools, i.e. schools which are owned and managed solely by the committees. As the House will be aware, my Department has been encouraging co-operation between secondary and vocational schools with the object of providing comprehensive educational facilities in each area of the country. The intention here is that joint resources will be used for this purpose in order to make good any deficiencies while at the same time avoiding waste and overlapping both in regard to accommodation requirements and teaching resources.

In a number of centres in which co-operation between secondary and vocational schools is being developed proposals have been made for the sharing of specialist facilities and ancillary accommodation, for example, science laboratories, assembly halls, gymnasia, playing fields etc., but under existing legislation the vocational education committees are precluded from contributing towards the cost of such facilities unless the ownership and management resides solely in the committees. The type of co-operation and collaboration envisaged could operate satisfactorily only if there were joint ownership and joint management. The amendments proposed in section I of this Bill would enable the vocational education committees, if they wish to do so, to contribute towards the cost of the facilities in question on the basis of their being jointly owned and managed by the committee and another educational authority. This will in turn facilitate the development of co-operation in many centres and help further to break down the barriers between the secondary and vocational systems.

It is now generally accepted that in order to provide comprehensive educational facilities at any kind of reasonable cost and making economic use of scarce teaching skills a large size school unit is necessary. As the House will be aware, our post-primary schools tend for historical reasons to be comparatively small in size. In most of our towns, there are two or three such schools operating for the most part independently of one another. In a few such areas, in which the schools need to be rebuilt, there is a fair measure of agreement that the schools should be amalgamated subject to an acceptable form of management for the new school on which the existing interests would be represented. This form of joint-management of a post-primary school would be new to this country and, as Deputies will appreciate, there are a number of practical difficulties which will need to be resolved in consultation with the interests concerned.

Section I would enable vocational education committees to contribute towards the cost of such schools if they thought fit to do so. I would emphasise that the section merely provides enabling powers and that it would be a matter for each committee to consider the circumstances of each particular case and decide for itself whether it wished to participate or not. Similarly, of course, it would be a matter for each secondary school authority to decide its own attitude towards any such proposal. It will be for my Department to secure the maximum degree of co-operation so as to ensure that the greatest possible benefit will accrue to the children of the nation from the resources at our disposal.

Section 2 while mandatory is also enabling in so far as under its terms a dissolved committee may be reconstituted at any time up to the end of the second election year after it has been dissolved. Under the existing legislation no reconstruction of such committee could take place until after the next local authority elections to be help after its dissolution had been held.

Mr. Donegan

We on this side of the House feel that this Bill is an appropriate step forward. Even if the word "co-education" has not been used by the Minister in his opening speech, all the indications are that co-education will increase in the years ahead and with it there must be a sharing of facilities. When one sees all the very fine new classrooms, new schools and old ones as well that lie vacant after the day's work is done, one is bound to feel that there is a wide scope for co-operation between the various secondary schools from the point of view of usage of all their facilities. In regard to one particular future project it is mooted that perhaps teachers could move across from one school to another. This represents another feature of the sharing of facilities. It was not fashionable up to recently to have boys and girls taught together but within the next ten or 15 years there will be quite a lot of co-education and, perhaps, teachers will spend a day in one school and another day in another school.

This is not a Bill which requires long discussion. It is an enabling Bill. I do not think there is much objection to section 2, the mandatory section. As the Minister pointed out, it is also enabling in as much as it enables a dissolved committee to be reconstituted. This would appear to be a proper view.

On behalf of my party I commend this Bill as something that has had to be done in the changing field of education.

Mr. Tunney

Fáiltím go fial roimh an mBille seo. Molaim an tAire agus an Roinn mar gheall ar an méid atá á dhéanamh acu maidir le comhoibriú agus comhaontú i gcúrsaí oideachais agus deinim comhgáirdeachas leo. Más maith é is mithid. Tá gear gá leis an mBille seo.

Tá súil agam go gcabhróidh gach éinne leis an Aire san obair dhian atá romhainn ar mhaithe le scoláirí na tíre agus, ar ndóigh, ar mhaithe leis an dtír féin. Tá an treoir tugtha ag an Aire agus ag an Roinn. Measaim go bhfuil ár mbuíochas agus ár gcomhghairdeas tuillte acu. Amach anseo tá súil agam go mbeidh an comhoibriú atá ag teastáil uathu maidir le hoideachas le fáil acu sa Teach seo, go mbeidh sé le fáil acu ó mhúinteoirí na tíre agus go dtuigfidh tuismitheoirí na tíre cad táidir lámhaibh acu, go dtuigfidh siad an géar-ghá atá ann má táimid chun leanúint ar aghaidh agus má táimid chun ár bpáirt a ghlacadh san Euróip nua a bhéas ann. Ní féidir níos mó bheith ag plé leis an modh traidisiúnta a bhí againn. Caithfear airgead a chaitheamh le daoine a threorú chun go mbeidh obair le fáil acu, nó go mbeidh siad i ndán obair a ghlacadh sa tír seo taobh amuigh de na gnáth-phostanna a bhí le fáil acu go dtí seo.

I welcome this Bill and I wish to congratulate the Minister and his Department on their awareness of the need to employ all our resources, especially in the field of education, to enable us to prepare our youth and subsequently our manhood to play their part in the new Europe that is evolving.

It will be accepted, I think, that in this new Europe there will be little room for isolationism. We can no longer remain isolated here. As a country we cannot remain isolated. No longer can any branch of education continue to enjoy, if that is the appropriate word, if that is the word they would use, the isolation which hitherto was theirs. The Minister is now indicating the need, as he sees it, for the marrying of the educational branches which hitherto, I am afraid, were in competition with and suspicious of each other to the detriment of both, and to the ultimate detriment of the country as a whole.

I congratulate the Minister on his approach to and his awareness of the need for our coming together now and treating education as we should. No longer can the traditional archaic, connotation of education survive. No longer can we continue, as might have been appropriate or adequate in the past, to prepare students for the Church, the professions, law, medicine, the Army and, perhaps, for Parliament, and leave the fall-outs to look after industry.

There must be an acceptance of the fact that education has a vital role to play in the field of industry. No longer can it be left to the fall-outs, or to primary school students who could not aspire to any profession, who could not aspire to the Civil Service or to clerical positions, to play their part in industry. No longer can we afford to accept that only the academic is the worthwhile member of society. No longer can we afford a situation where we are cultivating and fostering a certain academic elite, a certain educational aristocracy.

Mr. Donegan

I never subscribed to that.

Mr. Tunney

The fact that the Deputy might not have subscribed to it does not take away from the fact that that was the position, in my opinion. There was amongst the people of Ireland, I suggest, a feeling that, unless education led to a profession or a clerical position, it was not education. There was a certain "snobocracy" attaching to education. There was a feeling that the person who had the brain should go to what was formerly described as the secondary school, and the person who had the "hands" might go to what was formerly described as the vocational school. Now we have this marrying of the secondary and vocational schools and soon there will be no reference, I hope, to either and all will be described as post-primary education.

In this field of post-primary education there will be counselling and direction. There will be ample opportunities. There are urgent demands and, at the moment, I am afraid, we are not able to meet them. At the moment in the field of technology there is a shortage of highly skilled technicians. On the other hand, students from the secondary schools, having completed their courses, find nothing available for them. Last week in a hotel in Dublin, students who hoped to be successful in the leaving certificate examination were offering themselves, in the absence of anything else, for interview to people from a shop in London in which they hoped to be shop boys, with the leaving certificate.

There is a need for technicians. There is a need for skilled men, and that need cannot be satisfied. If the Bill which the Minister has introduced had been introduced some years ago, and if parents of the students had been told that in the years that lay ahead the white collar would disappear and the blue collar would emerge, and that it would be far better for them to send their children to schools where the sole emphasis was not on the academic type of education, those boys might now be in worthyhile positions or embarking on worthwhile careers which would be most beneficial to themselves and to the country.

The Minister is now hoping that, by giving powers to vocational educational committees which hitherto they did not enjoy, it will be possible for the vocationel educational committees to extend a co-operating hand to the secondary schools. I have no doubt that the vocational educational committees, manned as they are by men of common sense, men of understanding, men who are not concerned with the traditional, men who are not concerned with education per se, will do a good job.

I do not want to be accused of saying that we must not have education for education's sake. That is highy desirable and we must have it. The point I am making is that, if we are to satisfy the demands of the 20th century, there must be an extension of that definition. There must be more than what we have hitherto expected from education and complete awareness of the fact that, unless our education is geared beyond academic, abstract, intellectual pursuits, it will not be sufficient for the demands of this century. I hope that, when these powers are given to committees and they are anxious to put them into operation, the hitherto conservative elements will realise, even in deference to the students attending those schools, that the time has come for this merging and that there will not be the opportunity and the job satisfaction for the student who continues to move along the purely academic line. For a small minority these intellectual pursuits will still exist and it is important and necessary for all that the small minority should continue in them. I hope, however, the situation will be avoided where an amount of money is poured into this type of education at the end of which a student is produced for whom there is nothing except a shop assistant's job in London.

We will not get the type of education required unless there is co-operation between the committees and secondary school managers, unless there is understanding among teachers that all teachers are members of the one profession, that there will, and should be a movement of teachers, as Deputy Donegan said, from one school to another. I think it will also be necessary for the Department to have —I suggested this before and I hope the campaign will be carried out through Telefís Éireann—a campaign to remind parents of the changes that have occurred and indicate how they might direct their sons and daughters. It is all right to talk of career guidance in schools but the choice is not always left to students. In most cases the parents decide what field of education the boy will enter. There is not yet proper awareness among parents of how important it is that a boy should have knowledge which would lead him to worthwhile skilled employment and that no longer is it sufficient for him to be able to define the ablative absolute, to quote a Shakespearian soliloquy, or be able to indulge in certain abstract exercises for which there is little place in the world today. I do not discount the need for those things but I am dismissing the system which regarded them as all-important and regarded other matters, more important in my estimation, as insignificant.

Finally, I repeat my congratulations to the Minister and his Department for showing initiative in the utilisation of our resources and for their awareness that, in creating the wealth this country desires, a new dimension has appeared. I would now add education to the three factors that have hitherto been accepted as factors in the creation of wealth: land, labour and capital. These, and the proper type of education, constitute for me the factors which will create what this country requires to advance socially, economically and confidently into the next century.

Mr. Desmond

I welcome this much-needed piece of educational legislation first because it is in accordance with the general educational policy of the Labour Party. It is necessary to place this on record because in the early sixties the Labour Party was accused of being unduly Utopian in advocating the reorganisation and rationalisation of our educational structure. That this piece of legislation should come before the House and be in accord with our policy is particularly welcome.

The second reason why I welcome this legislation is that I feel it will get rid of the traditional, historical, much-to-be-deplored rigidity of structure within our educational system. While it will not completely remove that undue rigidity, it is nevertheless a valuable step towards a more comprehensive type of general educational system. Members of the House are only too well aware and too keenly conscious of the decisiveness and social wastefulness of the three systems of education— primary, vocational and secondary— operating at times almost autonomously, one would imagine, each in its own educationally watertight compartment. The extent to which these three sectors of education has tended to divide our community and be wasteful of educational resources, which are scarce and expensive, and have tended to create undue, unnecessary and profoundly distorting class divisions is considerable. Therefore, I welcome the legislation as something that will certainly mitigate that regrettable historical tendency in our educational system.

There is need and I think it is very much in the Minister's mind, to have greater interchange between those in vocational schools and those in the other post-primary sectors, between the vocational education committees and school managers in the secondary sector. There is need for greater liaison and co-operation and greater joint endeavour. I think the concept embodied in this Bill will end a good deal of what one might describe as the demoralisation currently very evident in many respects and self-developed within the system of industrial relations. This should act as a valuable constraint in the long term on those in the teaching profession who at least appreciate that they are all in the one profession and that they have a common loyalty to one another. The Bill is a constructive proposition and one which should contribute towards eradicating the class divisions within the profession which, I say with profound regret, still seem to be so rampant in some sectors of education.

This Bill, in broadening the scope of responsibility and the capacity of vocational education committees, will make a distinctive contribution to the development of a better and more comprehensive educational system. I commend the Minister and welcome this piece of legislation. Section 2 of the Bill, whereby a dissolved committee, notably that of Limerick, will be reconstituted, is also welcome, because unlike certain aspects of local government where bodies are dissolved, and tend to remain dissolved, it can be said in the context of a dissolved vocational education committee, the Minister is anxious to get immediate action to have it reconstituted.

Finally in regard to the form of joint management of a post-primary school which the Minister has given only in embryonic outline today, I should like to see these forms of management as broadly based and as broadly representative as possible, involving a large number of vocational education committees and involving not only the management and the owners of the secondary schools but also the teachers in these schools, and involving on a joint basis both vocational teachers and secondary teachers. They should equally take part in consultations about any new forms of joint management. Therefore the Minister should not hesitate to be flexible. I have no doubt that in bringing forward this legislation he is making, as far as we in the Labour Party are concerned, a very constructive approach and one which we welcome in the development of a more effective post-primary education system in this country.

Debate adjourned.