I move:
That Dáil Éireann calls upon the Government to raise immediately third level education grants and the eligibility limits which govern the award of such grants.
Initially, I should like to welcome the new Minister for Education and to congratulate him upon his appointment. The next few years will be an important time in education and I can promise the Minister that he will have continuing vigilance over his activities from these benches and that we will support any of his attempts to get more money for the educational services, which are so important today, while at the same time insisting on the continuing need for radical reform and change within the system so that the money spent will not be wasted.
The next few years are also going to be important because whether we like it or not they are going to be years of growth in education, especially in higher education. The latest OECD tables do not show this country in a particularly happy place with regard to the participation rates in higher education. In 1974, the latest year for which the full OECD figures are available, we had only 11 per cent of the appropriate age group in third level education. This is little more than half the number in third level education in other European countries. There is going to be pressure for growth and we want to ensure that the pressure for growth is accompanied by pressure for change.
We also have the very real point that there is at the moment, moving up through the second level educational system, a substantial number of young people who will, over the next few years, increasingly be demanding third level education. So that even if we were only to plan for an increase of 1 per cent in those participation rates, that 1 per cent would strain our already overcrowded institutions of higher education well beyond their present levels. If we are to raise our participation rates in higher education to anything like a realistic figure the changes that will have to be made are truly staggering. At present there are about 33,000 students in higher education. If we were to achieve parity of participation rates overnight with our European neighbours we would require between 70,000 and 90,000 places almost immediately to double the present number of places in our system.
The argument about how many places should be provided in higher education is one for another time and I do not propose to go into it here. We are talking about who should get the places that are available, but I mentioned these figures in order to point out the enormity of the task faced by the Minister for Education and to indicate the extent of the financing which he will have to find to meet it. It also underlines the importance of allocating the places that are available in the fairest and most democratic way possible. The pressures that are on the existing places are already almost beyond belief. There is a new central applications office servicing the universities. This year it received 14,000 applications for 5,000 first-year places. The NIHE in Limerick received 2,400 applications for 360 places. Some of the technological institutions in Dublin are receiving applications at the rate of 20 for each place. When you consider that in Britain, where even now people complain about the difficulty of getting into higher education, there are only two people for each place in the universities, you will see how much worse off we are and how important it is that we allocate our available places fairly.
It will not have escaped the notice of Members of this House that in the fairly recent past we had a general election. In that general election, perhaps for the first time, education at all levels became very much an issue. I believe that this is a change in Irish politics which we must welcome, a change for which the Labour Party, through their involvement in education at all levels, have been at least partly responsible. In response to this new interest in education at a political issue and not just something related to the Church or county council or whatever, the then Opposition made a number of specific promises and gave specific undertakings to the electorate. Some of them were made in their election manifesto and some of them were made before hand. In the Fianna Fáil research and support services document on educational policy, which was published in 1977, there occurs the sentence "Fianna Fáil will review and increase third level grants and scholarships using the consumer price index as a guideline. En route grants will be provided where the appropriate conditions are fulfilled". In the election manifesto itself we read the words, "Fianna Fáil will immediately raise the third-level grants and mindful of the fact that eligibility limits have not been raised during a period of over 100 per cent inflation, will raise the limits realistically". Ignoring the fact that this sentence was published after the grants and eligibility levels had been raised, we can say that this represents a clear commitment. On page 22 of the same manifesto there is the sentence "People in need have a right to income maintenance". This particular pledge from the Fianna Fáil Party was underlined by the leader of that party, the present Taoiseach, Deputy Jack Lynch, when he visited the constituency of the present Minister for Education during the election campaign. In The Irish Press of 6th June, 1977, in an article by the paper's education correspondent Pat Holmes, we read:
As the Union of Students in Ireland awaits response from the parties on the main issues affecting their members, the Opposition Leader, Mr. Lynch, last night pledged that Fianna Fáil would raise third-level grants and eligibility limits to realistic levels in line with inflation.
There are a couple of words here that are important and that is why the Parliamentary Labour Party put down this motion. They are the words "pledge", "immediately", "raise", "realistically". The Oxford English Dictionary, a copy of which is in our excellent Library, has a splendid definition of "immediately" which I would refer to the attention of the Minister. It defines "immediately" as "without any delay or lapse of time, instantly, directly, straight away, at once".
We are now more than the celebrated 100 days into the new Government and we have not heard of any action on this pledge. The students who might have voted on the strength of it are now in colleges or technological institutions on the grants which they, perhaps over-confidently, hoped would be raised. This is the proper time to ask the new Government when they intend to implement this pledge and what their definition of "immediately" is because the redemption of that pledge is already overdue for the thousands of students who have gone into college for the first time this Autumn. We do not want a situation in which the fulfilment of election promises is delayed to the point where the redemption of them becomes not the fulfilment of the original promise but a bribe to be forgotten after the election for which the promises were made. This totally devalues political rhetoric and goodness knows it has been devalued enough already.
I should like to talk about the background to the scheme. It is a scheme which was launched by the party of the present Minister in 1967-68. It is one of my contentions that many of the inadequacies of the present scheme stem from the fact that at its very introduction in 1968 it was under-financed, ill-conceived and wrongly structured. My colleague, Deputy Eileen Desmond who was education spokesman for this party at that time pointed out many of these short-comings as also did Deputy Michael O'Leary. To read their speeches to-day is to read something about the situation we are witnessing now in our third level institutions.
One of the main defects of the original scheme, for example, and a defect that has been carried through to the present, is that it focussed primarily on the universities when all sensible educational thinking of the time was pointing to the need to develop a countervailing entrance to the universities, to help in particular students who were going to institutions other than university institutions. The then Minister for Education, Deputy Lenihan said, as reported at columns 326-7 of the Official Report for April 24, 1968:
The whole purpose of student grants is to equip the child for higher education and logically the only subjects that should count as regards the standard should be subjects to which the child will be devoting himself or herself in the university.
Note the logical leap, the instant closing of the gap—higher education equals university education. I am convinced this was the basic thinking behind the scheme. That thinking, unfortunately, is with us to-day and has to be challenged. The only way in which it can be challenged is to change the scheme, to incorporate in it the appropriate structural changes. This is something we shall be looking to the Minister to undertake.
The other main defeat in the scheme as it was introduced by the then Fianna Fáil Government was that it skated over some of the most horrific gaps in our education system. At column 273 of the Official Report of the same date as that to which I have referred already, the then Minister for Education said:
... the introduction of free post-primary education in September, 1967, has rendered unnecessary the provision of scholarships to second level education, so that we may now tackle the problem of enabling deserving students to proceed to third level studies at universities and comparable institutions.
That sentence reads very hollow to-day because we all know that just as the grant system is not what we would wish it to be, so also the free education scheme which was introduced by the same Government at that time has become increasingly less free. We know that the sham of pretending that a free post-primary education exists is the only possible foundation on which can be built an equally inadequate third level grant system.
There is a poverty gap in the education system of which most educationalists and virtually all economists are aware. I refer to the gap between the ending of compulsory education at 15 and the beginning, at 17 or 18, of third level education. You can have all the third-level grants in the world but so long as you have people who cannot cross that gap, the grants will be of no use to them. The costs of reaching the point at which one might or might not qualify for a third-level education grant are much heavier than many people suppose. A couple of professors have calculated for the ESRI that for the average couple the cost of maintaining a child in education up to third level is about £700 a year, including basically the wages they would have had into the household had the child gone to work. This is the poverty gap in education and it was the failure of the then Government to tackle that gap that has made the present third level system so much of a sham.
Sometimes I think that the grants scheme at third level as devised in 1967-68 and as introduced to, unfortunately, an uncritical public, was almost one devised for people who did not exist. It was almost as if the Minister of the time looked around at the possible entrants to third level education, identified a small single group of such entrants and then devised a grant scheme that would cater for them alone. The scheme was a total Catch 22 situation. It catered only for people of certain income levels or people whose farms were of a certain rateable valuation. In so far as the majority of people were concerned their incomes were too high to enable them to avail of the grants while the very poor were too poor to allow their children to remain at school up to 17 so that in their case the grant was irrelevant anyway.
It will be seen, therefore, that most people would not be in a position to avail of the grant and that the people for whom allegedly it was intended were too poor to meet the basic costs of keeping their children at school until such time as they might be able to avail of the grant. This situation has long been recognised by educationalists and economists.
I should like to deal now with the question of the several inadequacies of the present scheme. They relate, first, to the levels of the scheme and, secondly, to the elegibility criteria. I have argued already that the levels of the scheme in 1968 were not sufficient. Nine years have elapsed since then— some of them under Fianna Fáil administration and some under the National Coalition—and in all of this time inflation has taken place so that the grants have been progressively eroded.
We can attempt now to put a figure on what the grant might be. If we were to calculate it solely on the basis of inflation the present grant at the maximum level would be about £768. The Union of Students in Ireland, on criteria which I consider modest enough on all counts, say that it costs about £862 to support a student for the 32 weeks of the academic year and that is at a comparatively modest level of existence. The present level of the grant, despite being increased during the term of office of the last Government, is now £350. Obviously, there is a substantial gap, a gap which means that for some students agonising choices have to be made as, for instance, between buying food and buying books. All this sounds as if one is asking for a monumental increase in the current level of the grant but it may be looked at in this way: one can say that if the Fianna Fáil grant in 1968 was inadequate it was at least somewhere in the region of what might have been expected. In fact, the figure that has been suggested as the figure to which the grant might be increased, represents an increase of only 12 per cent on the real value in 1968. That is the extent of the Fianna Fáil promise. We are entitled to ask whether they now consider this 12 per cent to be too high.
Again, on the question of levels, comparisons can be made with Northern Ireland, although I hesitate to make such comparisons on many occasions because of the substantial differences between the two jurisdictions. However, some of the differences are so substantial as to merit special comment. In Northern Ireland, for instance, a student gets a bigger grant if he is married and the level of the extra grant he will get for one dependant is higher than the largest grant any student can get down here. Why? Because of the difference between £350 and £470. We have to ask whether this scheme is not operating simply as pocket-money for some people or forcing some students into serious situations in which they have to make the agonising choice between eating or study. There is a school of thought which says that, given the existence of higher education grants and the fact that they have been increased on several occasions since 1968, it is very surprising that there are not as many students in college from the poorer sections of the population as one might expect. This thesis is surprisingly fashionable, not least because it helps to underwrite suspicion in the minds of the otherwise well-meaning that people who are the more disadvantaged in our society are less interested in education. A classic example of this occurs in a recent survey carried out by a member of the administration staff in University College, Dublin, and published in the UCD News of July-September, 1976, the staff organ of the college. Miss Burns who wrote this article based it on a survey she carried out of the social background of students entering the college over a ten-year period. Her figures are fascinating and I have no quarrel with them. What I do quarrel with is her interpretation. I quote:
... over the last ten years, student representation from the "working class" grouping has increased by about 6%. The drop in the upper middle class plus group is about 4%. During this ten year period, in 1968, the government made a large increase in university grants, this provision might lead one to expect that even after only 7 years the socio-economic background of university students would have grown more rapidly, than indicated in the present survey, to be more representative of the population as a whole. However, as Dr. Nevin pointed out in her report, after comparison with several European countries where third level education is more heavily subsidised, money is not the problem to be overcome, but the lack of "family motivation and aspiration" in the "lower social groupings".
This is a myth and it is about time that this myth was nailed in this House if not in the mind of the Minister for Education. It is all very well for people to say that higher education grants are not taken up because disadvantaged people are not interested in education. In recent years there have been substantial proportions of moneys voted for higher education which have not been taken up. People will always say that disadvantaged students will not take up grants because they are not interested in education. The only possible answer to that is to ask how many of the people who make this accusation and this analysis of the situation have ever tried to live on £350 a year. You have to throw into the balance either an awful lot of cash or an awful lot of idealism. You cannot eat idealism, you cannot spread it on bread. This is a fundamental misconception.
For the purposes of argument, if it were true that the reason that grants are not taken up is that people are not interested in education, the grants could be increased immediately to a realistic figure; you can double them, you can make them £1,000 and you would save your money because people still would not apply for them. I bet they would be applying for them if they were £1,000 because then they would represent more nearly what the most disadvantaged people need for study at a university institution. Our party have always insisted that both the levels of grants and eligibility criteria should be reviewed appropriately to ensure that students who get places in institutions of higher education should not be unfairly discriminated against.
On the question of the eligibility criteria several points can be made. Even though I was glad at the time that the upward revision was made, I must say that the present income limits are probably still too low. It is now time for the Minister to look at them again. He has promised to do so and he has promised action on them immediately. We want to know when "immediately" will be. Something has to be done to ensure an appropriate balance between the eligibility criteria for people who are wage and salary earners or self-employed in urban and rural areas. It may be argued that this will never happen satisfactorily until we have greater horizontal equity in the taxation system but things can still be done.
The Union of Students in Ireland have suggested a scheme whereby full grants will be given to students with a claw-back on the parental income tax system. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks about it. I would also be interested to know whether, instead of allocating a grant as at present on a person's gross income, the Minister will be prepared to allocate it on the nett income. This, would have to be accompanied by some appropriate provision of tax allowances for dependent children in third level education, but it would at least create a situation in which any ambiguity about the eligibility of any child for any grant could be resolved by a certificate from the Revenue Commissioners. The more people who come within the general ambit of the Revenue Commissioners the better.
The inequity of the present system is shown in that it does not subsidise large numbers of people who have got places in educational institutions and whose means may be comparatively limited. The Minister should consider, not subsidising individuals per se, but subsidising the places in these third level institutions so that people who are accepted by third level institutions will have an automatic entitlement, depending on the means test that I am talking about, to a grant which will enable them to complete their education without any undue hardship.
The present scheme has a number of anomalies some of which have emerged only comparatively recently. For example, there is an anomaly that a person who fails to qualify for a grant for his child this year and may qualify in a subsequent year after a change or an upward revision of the grants will not come under the scheme unless his income actually falls below the level which would have entitled him to a grant in the year in which he first applied. This can cause extra-ordinary hardship in families where the income may have fallen dramatically, for example through a parent going on pension, and where the outgoings have remained almost constant.
Another problem relates to the level of the fee subsidy. In broad terms fee subsidies cover all fees in institutions in this jurisdiction, but because of recent policy changes in Britain fees being charged by Northern Ireland educational institutions, at which these grants are also tenable, are now going up year by year. Next year they will be of the order of £500 or £600 in some of the institutions in Northern Ireland to which grant-aided students from the Republic will go. Very often too they will go to these institutions not because they want to be there but because the courses which those institutions offer are not available in the Republic. A very active action committee in County Donegal, including, I am sure, many members of the Minister's own party, are very vocal on this point. I urge the Minister to listen to them. In the new university at Coleraine a certain four-year degree course has its first year as a certificate course and because it is regarded as a certificate course it is not eligible for a grant from the Department of Education here. These are matters which the Minister might not be aware of and which I am glad to bring to his attention. I will be anxious to see that he does something about them.
It is still possible for students of comparatively insignificant means to get a place in a university with three honours, which will not entitle them to a grant, while a neighbour who may be considered to be better off will squeak into a university place with two honours. In other words, the student with two honours will benefit from the ongoing subsidy of about £1,000 per student per year which the State pays in indirect and direct grants to the universities. The other student who has a higher academic standard cannot receive the subsidy from the State because he is one honour short of the particular level. It is also theoretically possible, I believe, for a student to qualify for a grant but not to be able to get a place in the institution of his choice or in the course of his choice within a particular institution. What is the point of that? This is the sort of anomaly the Minister should be looking at.
There is a particularly urgent anomaly in the whole Cork area where, owing to a disagreement about the definition of distance, large numbers of students already in their first year in college have not been given grants to which they are certainly entitled. The dispute relates to whether or not these students are living close to a university. The Department's response to this dispute has been, as I understand it correctly, to freeze grants to all students affected, so that there are students coming from Roscarbery, Skibbereen, Baltimore and probably from Hare Island who are not being given the grant at the higher level because of the dispute about the eligibility of students who live closer to Cork city. Some of these places in west Cork are probably as far from Cork as Cork is from Dublin. A former Minister for Education, Deputy Lenihan, once gave it as his interpretation that a student would get the grant at the higher level if he lived further than a reasonable journey in the morning from his third level institution. I would put it to the Minister that west Cork is considerably more than a reasonable morning's journey from any institution in Cork city and that the failure to resolve this dispute is causing severe hardship to many students, especially those in rural areas.
Another anomaly relates to the question of students who are following a full-time course for professional musicianship. There is no such course in Ireland or Northern Ireland at the moment. Students have to go to England. There are only about 20 of them in the country. Can the Minister not see his way to making people like this eligible for grants pending the suitable reintegration of music into our third level education system.
The final and perhaps the greatest anomaly is simply the fact that parental income alone is the income that counts for the definition of the grant. There is no grant for married students. There is no grant—and this is an even harder case—for a girl who may be half-way through her career at college, who becomes pregnant and has a baby, is thrown out of the house—this happens still in holy Ireland today—and wants to continue with her course to achieve a qualification so that she can keep and look after her baby. There is no grant for her because her grant is dependent on her parents' income. Worse still, even if she were entitled to a grant on her parents' income, any miserable pittance of an income which she might have to try to keep body and soul together would be added to her parents' income and might exclude her from a grant on that basis.
There is an enormous discrimination in the operation of this grants system against people who are not school leavers. Various local authorities operate schemes whereby it is possible for people to defer the grants for two years, but that it all. This is quite unfair. It discriminates not just against a minority but against a huge number of people whose educational experience, through no fault of their own, has been drastically curtailed. According to the 1971 census there are living in Ireland at the moment about one million people whose education ended at primary school. These are the people for whom the scheme was not conceived. These are the people who are left high and dry by this scheme. I would argue very strongly that that is a lot of people and we should be doing something more about them. The universities themselves have not been conspicious in granting educational facilities to these people. If they are not going to do it, it is about time the Government were firm and did something about it.
Finally, there is the absence of an annual review, and not only that, but the absense of a review which was promised by the last Government and which the last Government promised would be in operation by the autumn of this year. I want to ask the Minister now what has happened to that review, what the result of it has been, and are we going to see the result of the work that was done in the Department on a fundamental review on the basis of this scheme, a review which I would argue is long overdue? I appreciate that not all the anomalies in the original scheme have been cured in four years of government by the National Coalition, despite the fact that when the National Coalition left office the grants were 45 per cent higher than the inadequate basis on which they had been presented to the incoming Fianna Fáil Government. We are now in a new situation. The Government have made promises and the electorate and particularly the young people in that electorate are looking to the Government to keep those promises.
The new Minister for Education, with that roundness of phrase for which he is justly famous, apparently told some students who went to see him recently and complained about the inefficiencies of the scheme : "I will be not like the puck goat in the Bible, sent out into the desert for the sins of the Coalition". If the Minister is sent out into the desert it will not be for the sins of the National Coalition but for the sins of Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil have four years to commit those sins. They may or may not take pleasure in them, but I suspect that if they do it will be the last pleasure they will have for a long time.
