I move:
That Dáil Éireann:—
—noting the fact that the present capitation grant for pupils in primary schools is grossly inadequate;
—noting that the Government, in spite of their manifesto commitment immediately to increase the capitation grant, has still not paid any increase in the grant beyond the level determined prior to the 1977 general election;
—conscious of the rapidly escalating cost of heating and cleaning national schools, and the increasing burden being put on local communities in this regard;
—alarmed at the deterioration in many school premises because of lack of proper maintenance; and
—critical of the failure of the Minister for Education to ensure continued and adequate teacher representation on school management boards;
calls on the Government immediately to increase the capitation grant for pupils in primary schools to an interim minimum of £15.00 per pupil, together with an appropriate rate of local contribution, in order to ensure that heating and cleaning of national schools reaches an acceptable standard, and in order to ensure that the already marked deterioration in the condition of many schools is halted; calls on the Government to make a positive response to proposals by teachers and others for more appropriate structures for representation and accountability within the school management system.
There are two things of importance about this motion. The first, naturally enough, is the wording, and the second is the timing. In all fairness it could be said that now, approximately 20 months after the Government assumed office, is an appropriate time to measure their performance and the performance of individual Departments in a number of key areas. The area this motion in the name of the Labour Party chooses to measure relates to the all-important one of primary education, not indeed all aspects of primary education but those which were the particular concern of the Minister when he was in Opposition and which formed a major element in the Fianna Fáil manifesto in the 1977 general election.
This motion says in couple of phrases that this Government and the Minister have not matched up in the areas identified in the motion to the expectations they aroused in the publication of the manifesto and in particular the section on education. It is a way of saying that this House, having seen the performance of the Government in these areas over the past 20 months, has no confidence in their ability to do any better in the 20 months or however longer that remains to them. It is probably fair to say that an average man reading the Government manifesto in 1977 could have been forgiven for thinking that everybody was being promised more for everything. Nowhere is this truer than in education. The electorate were encouraged to believe that all they had to do was to return a Fianna Fáil Government to office and things would automatically get better. We are already seeing the cracks in the facade.
One of the simplest ways in which I can give an example of that is that when unpopular decisions come to be announced they tend to be announced as Government decisions, such as raising the fees in universities, and when popular decisions are announced, such as the raising of grant level for third level students, they are announced by the Minister. This is no doubt true of all Ministers in all Governments at all times. It is important to identify it now because it shows precisely what is happening not just inside the Department of Education but between the Department and the Minister for Education and the Minister's Cabinet colleagues. This party believe that the inevitable squeeze on education and on the other social services is inevitable precisely because of the budgetary and fiscal policies adopted and followed by the Government since the election. That is a wider economic debate and I will not go into it here. There are fundamental ground rules for the assertions that I will be making.
The motion refers to a number of specific matters in relation to primary education. It notes in particular the fact that the present capitation grant for pupils in primary schools is grossly inadequate and that the Government, in spite of their manifesto commitment immediately to increase the capitation grant have still not paid any increase in the grant beyond the level determined prior to the 1977 general election. It is important to realise exactly what this motion says. In order to do that we have to turn back to the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. In the section dealing with education it says on page 41, paragraph 6:
Fianna Fáil will immediately increase the capitation grant for primary school pupils.
That manifesto was published a short time after an announcement by the then Minister for Education, Deputy Peter Barry, in relation to the level of capitation grants for primary schools. The relevant quotation from his statement, dated 19 May 1977 was:
I have decided that provision should be made in the Estimates for 1978 that the payment of the grant in respect of the school year 1977-78, that is in January 1978 and in June 1978, should be at the rate of £80 per annum per pupil. This increased grant of £80 from the Department will attract a contribution of at least £2 from local sources, and the school authorities, accordingly, will have a minimum of £10 per pupil as against a minimum of £7.50 at present, i.e. an increase of 33? per cent. This increase in the capitation grants from the Department of Education is estimated to cost about £1.2 million in 1978.
When the Minister sitting on the other side of the House this evening assumed office one of the earliest things I asked him about was when he proposed to fulfil the Fianna Fáil commitment immediately to increase the capitalisation grants. All these attempts to elicit necessary information were met by a considerable degree of evasion and eventually by a de facto admission that the Minister's generosity in paying the increased amounts, which had been determined prior to the general election, was a fulfilment of the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. The Minister has never to my knowledge said this in so many words but he has certainly implied it. If he implies it he must logically stand over it. If he does not stand over it, then it is plainly clear that Fianna Fáil have not fulfilled that part of the manifesto. If he stands over it he is in the awkward position of having to maintain that the payment made by the Government on a commitment of a proceding Government amounts to an increase such as was specified in the Opposition manifesto of the day.
The increase specified by the then Minister for Education was paid in due course. Any level-headed, same, average person who looks at the commitment by the Fianna Fáil Government in their manifesto would have expected that if that commitment were to be honoured a grant would have been increased beyond the £80 level specified by Deputy Peter Barry. There is no simple way in which the Minister can evade that reading of plain English. It is not as if it would have cost that much. The Minister could have put an extra £1 per pupil on top of the £8 decreed by Deputy Barry. It would have cost the Government and the tax-payers about £½ million. Instead of giving £½ million to the primary sector of education in fulfilment of an unambiguous pre-election commitment, they gave £5 million back to the wealthiest sector of our community by abolishing the wealth tax, a matter which was not in their pre-election manifesto at all. It would have taken 10 per cent of what they gave to the richest people honestly and seriously to fulfil their election commitment of raising immediately the primary school capitation grants. Anybody who does the political mathematics of that equation will realise that, by not honouring that part of their manifesto when compared with the other budgetary and fiscal policies they adopted immediately after coming into office, this must be seen as failure.
We are given to understand that in the coming school year there will be a further increase in the capitation grants for primary school pupils. We are not told, for very good reasons, whether or not this is the Minister's implementation of the manifesto's commitment to raise grants immediately. I do not think that even somebody with the Minister's elasticity of the concept of language would accept that 20 months or more constitutes "immediately". We are to have an increase but when I questioned the Minister recently about this he as much as said that I could do my sums like anybody else and if I looked at what was provided last year and what is provided for this year, I would see there is an increase. Not being one to duck an invitation such as the Minister offered, I did my sums. On the basis that an extra £1.2 million is being allocated for increased capitation grants in national schools in the next school year, we must look at it in terms of whether or not it relates in any real sense to the Fianna Fáil manifesto and whether it is adequate to meet the situation.
In relation to the Fianna Fáil manifesto, even if one were to stretch language beyond its breaking point and accept that this increase is what they promised in 1977, it is fair to add that anybody reading the manifesto and seeing their commitment to increase the primary school capitation grant would expect that whatever increase was negotiated would result in an increase in real terms to the primary schools of the value of that grant. The Minister has been unduly modest and I suspect he may not be proud of what he has to offer. If the Minister can claim that the grant at the beginning of the winter term this year will match the value, after inflation, that it had when it was first introduced, it is the most he can do. I doubt if he can even do that.
As regards the increase in all items in the consumer price index, if one takes the figure in November 1975 as 100, the figure in November 1978 was 144.2. The date in 1975 is the nearest date to that on which the first payment was made under the previous administration. The grants will not really become operative in their increased form until the autumn of this year. We have to take a national figure for inflation between November 1978 and November 1979. It is reasonable to assume an inflation figure of 10 per cent for that period. If one adds 10 per cent to 144.2 one gets a figure of 158.4, rounded up to 160.
If we do our sums on the basis that for every £1 that the primary school got for each of its pupils in 1975 it should get at least £1.60 by the autumn of this year to compensate for inflation, we will see that the appropriate grant would be of the order of £9.60. The Minister, if I am right in assuming this, is indicating that the grant from his Department for the coming year will be of the order of £10. It would appear as if he had if not exactly generously kept the value of the grant in line with the inflation over that period.
However, two things need to be said. Firstly, over the period we are talking about the proportion of the cost of maintaining national schools which is accounted for by heating by oil and electricity will have gone up far more dramatically than the average we are talking about. We read in today's papers that the ESB have applied for a price increase of the order of 20 per cent. The question is not only what will that do to the CPI and to inflation but what will it do to the budget of primary schools which are, in some cases, enormously dependent on electricity for heating? In other cases they are dependent on oil the price of which the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy has also assured us, with some sadness, will go up. If we accept—I do not, because of the oil price increases and other factors—that the increase in the grant will keep pace with inflation, it is not enough in terms of the Fianna Fáil manifesto. What people were entitled to expect was an increase in real terms in the capitation grants of national schools. That did not happen. It is possible to argue that the value in real terms might have decreased.
Secondly, how many of our primary school management boards are in silent and hopeless breach of the Department of Education regulations not to run overdrafts? What does the Department of Education propose to do about it if they are? The story from all areas is that the level of grants is not enough, that because it is not enough the condition of schools is deteriorating. Basic exterior maintenance, painting and so on, has had to be neglected in favour of the basic primary consideration of keeping the children warm. Not even that consideration has been capable of being fulfilled in all instances.
Another aspect of this problem is the ratio of expenditure on these items between this country and Northern Ireland. The Minister, as somebody who sits for a constituency in a Border county, must be as conscious as anybody else, if not more so, of the implications for national unity of any widening of the gap in social services in both parts of this island. In some regards that gap has been narrowed but I would argue that, if anything, it has been widened in relation to education. The National Economic and Social Council, in a report in 1975, talking about expenditure on non-teacher items such as heating and cleaning in primary schools in Northern Ireland and the Republic, argued:
Expenditure in Northern Ireland is over seventeen times greater on a perpupil basis for these items. Even if one includes our earlier maximum estimate of £3.50 locally financed expenditure per pupil in the Republic, and excludes all private expenditure elsewhere, non-teacher expenditure is still almost six times as great in Northern Ireland and England and Wales. These are extremely large differences and must reflect significant differences in resources available to teachers and children in schools, and it would be unlikely if they did not have some effect on educational attainment in the long run.
Later on in the same report the author's note reads:
Taken overall, the provision of educational and non-educational services to primary school pupils may be aggregated as follows. (The figures once again refer to 1971-72, but they may be taken as a reliable guide to more recent years because policy developments have not been significant since that date). In the Republic, expenditure per pupil in primary schools from public funds was £64.90 of which £59.97 went on teachers' salaries, £1.70 on other "in-school" expenditure and £3.43 on "non-educational" items (meals, transport etc.).
In Northern Ireland public expenditure was £121.76 per primary pupil, of which £69.94 went on teachers' salaries, £30.60 on other "in-school" items and £21.22 on "non-educational" items.
The difference that we are talking about are enormous in scale.
