Irish Citizen's News : FG & Labour "knowledge economy"

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FG and Labour refuse to reverse cuts to students grants


Last night, the "government in waiting", Fine Gael and Labour could not make a promise to strickened students to reverse the cuts to their grants.

The Union of Students in Ireland is furious over the change which it claims will force many to drop out of college.

Anger is mounting over drastic cuts in grants for 25,000 students who will lose €1,700 each on average from next September.

The students will be forced onto lower grants because they live less than 45km from college.

Until now they got the higher 'non-adjacent' grant which kicked in at 24km from college.
 

You've won the Sweepstakes - The outsourcing of responsibility in south Ireland.

When the saorstát was set up the new administration choose the least path of resistance when it came to the provision of a number of important services. Two fundamental services necessary for the development of a state where effectively devolved from state control - Education and Health. While there may have been a reason at the start to do so to allow this to continue for decades was a serious failure of State responsibility and helped create or perpetuate a state not able to identify its responsibilities and act on them.

Significant elements of Health care was provided by a mix of hospitals predominantly ran by the catholic church, with some few provided by the protestant churches and some intermittent, and resisted, state oversight. However while both voluntary hospitals resisted the state they accepted its funding as and when needed. The saorstat was naturally in a financially weakened state considering the turbulent times it had passed through. Due to a low population base and a weakened economy it had difficulty raising the necessary funds to support hospitals. The answer was the Irish hospital sweepstakes - a state monopoly on lottery i.e a gambling racket -  not that I dont have anything against a flutter but you'd think churches would. The sweepstakes was an okay idea in the sense that it managed to extend the funding of hospitals beyond the limited population of the saorstát with significant funds coming from abroad. It was a bad idea in that it was used to fund institutions which were not under the absolute control of the state but were the equivalent of privatised institutions. Mary Harney would have liked the idea - State money to support non-state monopolies of critical services.

The Sweepstake itself was open to all the flaws of a racket managed by Govts. (of both parties) with a penchant for handing responsibility to someone, anyone.  The American edition of Reader's Digest once described the Sweeps as "the greatest bleeding heart racket in the world". Many of the funds raised in America of Britain never made it back to Ireland but went into the pockets of distributors. But there was a more pernicious element to the Sweepstakes than that.

The story of the Sweepstakes has many parallels with modern Ireland. The Sweepstakes was set up with loopholes that allowed its organisers leave large sums undeclared as expenses. The impact of the sweepstakes started to spread to other sectors beyond the health. Soon directors of the Sweepstakes were to be found in every sector of the economy with some directors sitting on up to 30 company boards. Similar to the golden circle mapped by TASC a small group of men were taking control over every aspect of the economy. Apparently RTE had enough material in the mid 1970s to expose the deep concerns many felt about the Sweepstakes. It will surprise no one that RTE choose not to broadcast it. (How RTE can be made a neutral non-govt. controlled station is an important challenge for the future.)

The state failing to provide important services, instead relying on non-state institutions funded by state raised revenue, corruption and the misuse of state funds to gain control of wide sectors of the economy, a media gagged and incapable of reporting the truth. A decades long story unchallenged by FF or by FG.

Education is also another area where the state just mosied on glad that someone else was doing the lifting.  Currently about 90% of primary schools are patroned by the Roman Catholic church. These schools are privately owned, publicly funded institutions. Across the school sector the state is an outside party - there to pay the bills. The patron is not a figure head. They have ultimate responsibility for the school ethos, the appointment of the board of management, financial and legal matters and the supervision of staff appointments in accordance with Department regulations. Patrons generally discharge their responsibilities in close consultation with boards of management and other interested parties involved in the schools. In other words they have significant powers.

While the catholic church figures heavily in the outsourcing of Education as well this is not about the catholic church. Indeed there are many other denominations and of  course non-denominational schools. Similarly while in the Health sector there are some very objectionable acts by catholic denominated churches. (Notably in 2005 the board of the Mater Hospital in Dublin stopped a trial for a new cancer drug. Women who wished to take part in the trial could not get pregnant which obviously meant they had to use contraception or not have sex. This was in conflict with the ethos. Money from gambling was not in conflict with the ethos of hospitals though - but as horrible a story as that is I am not trying to focus on the catholic church here)


The main focus must be on the state's tendency to step back from taking responsibility for critical functions. While they may have reason to do so for a few years at the foundation of the southern state it was not acceptable to leave the situation continue for decades across two of the most important areas in which a state must provide services. To do so was to accept the principle that any service, no matter how critical need not fall under the Govt's direct and complete control. The Govt. became a partner rather than a leader. Rather than forcing the pace of change, modernisation etc. it just sat back and let society drift. Little surprise then that the current Govt. has provided little leadership in the financial crisis. Instead it has taken the Banks at their word, it has followed the interests of the developers and the golden circle rather than steering its own course. Commentators like David McWilliams and Brian Lucey have both wondered aloud about whose interest the Govt. is serving. At this point about 3/4 of the south's residents agree its not the Irish nation. But I dont believe that the Govt. could ever have done anything other than follow the Banks and the advice of the special interest groups even if they were not as delinquent as they have proven. The tradition of governance in south Ireland is not one of leadership but of relinquishing sovereignty to any group willing to take over some of its tasks.

Fianna Fail stand indicted as do Fine Gael on this point.

The final point on this abdication of responsibility I will leave to Professor Kathleen Lynch who recently gave the annual Tasc lecture. In a speech entitled From a Neo-Liberal to an Egalitarian State: Imagining a Different Future' she notes:

As a society, we do not have a strong commitment to public solidarity despite our rhetoric. This is reflected in failure over the course of the last 10 years for social welfare provisions to keep pace with the cost of living. We have one of the lowest rates of social expenditures on education, housing, transport and welfare within the EU. (See Tables 1 and 2 below using the SILC data). Our lack of commitment to the public sphere is evident in many concrete ways, from the lack of public spaces for play for children (especially safe indoor places) to the lack of public sports facilities, to the lack of investment parks and public amenities in so many towns and villages.

It is even evident in our churches. Most of our leisure and sports facilities are actually privately owned by clubs that are legally constituted as private bodies; GAA pitches, tennis courts, gyms, rugby pitches, golf courses etc. are all private. Indoor play areas for children are almost universally commercial. And the lack of commitment to the good of the public sphere is evident when public and private interests collide; it is evident in the way space is organised and the quality of the built environment between public and private hospitals, in the relative luxury and comfort of private rooms versus public wards; it is visible in the pitches, tennis courts and other facilities in well-off schools compared with the bare yards of small fields that are there for those in less-well-off or poorer areas.

The Knowledge Econonmy is for you and you but not you.

The knowledge economy is one of the great tropes of modern political discourse. It righfully takes its place as one of the key strategic considerations for all policy makers in how to manage the transiton of the economy. However the knowledge economy does not in and of itself promise a bright future for all. The knowledge economy will only help those who are given the opportunity to skill up to take advantage of it. The new minister for Education might think the govt. is providing equal opportunity to raise all boats but the evidence says otherwise.

There is a continued social inequality in access and entry to higher education among particular socio-economic groups according to the Higher Education Authority/ ESRI’s recent report –“ Hidden Disadvantage, a study of the low particpation in Higher Education by the Non-Manual Group”. While the trend has been for increased particpation in Higher education one social group, the non-manual, is participating less and less in higher education.

So who are the non-manual group? Well they are 1 in 5 of the adult population of the southern state but they are split between intermediate non-manual (i.e Garda Seargeants, Govt. Executivbe officials) and “other non-manual”workers. Its the latter of course who are facing the obstacles. Typically their occupational positions are bus drivers, service sector workers etc. They are a demographic in south Irish society that is experiencing many barriers to participation in Hgher education and rather than seeing their equality of opportunity extended it is instead being restricted.

The knowledge economy or Smart economy has been defined as a strategy of using high value add roles to generate further economic activity. But to whose benefit. Its been well noted that the completion a higher education course contributes to higher earnings over a person's lifespan. While not the be all and end all greater access to Higher Education for all demographic groups will contribute to the process of solving class inequalities "not by making the working class more middle class, but in working at dismantling and sharing out the economic, social and cultural capital which goes with middle-class status".

The average rate of participation in Higher Education in the south is 55%. The Govt. has a stated target of 54% for all socio-economic groups by 2020. Yet the Non Manual group is sliding the other direction - from 29 per cent in 1998 to between 25 and 27 per cent in 2004. And rather than be alarmed at these figures the Govt. instead decided to wield the axe on educational equality of opportunity by cutting funding for school infrastructure, cutting the student maintenance grant by 5%, scrapping the Millennium Partnership Fund, which provides financial assistance for further and higher education students who are experiencing financial difficulties while attending college.

The Higher Education Authority report demonstrates that such an approach will only exacerbate the situation. For students in the non-manual demographic the consideration of cost of education plays a role either due to the direct cost of education or the prospect of lost income by going straight into education. However as the report notes the recent collapse of the labour market will remove the lure to bypass Higher education yet failure to tackle the other factors cotributing to the low participation rate by this social group will result in even greater marginalisation.

The other factors contributing to low particpation rates by the non-manual group are varied but one is key - Socio-economic background :your background determines the forms of cultural, social and economic capital and resources you have which differentially frames the choices you can make.

This means that "Young people from non-manual backgrounds do not possess the cultural capital necessary to succeed within an educational system geared towards the dominant class." i.e if neither your siblings, your parents, your neighbours or many in your learning environment have experienced Higher Education or see it as a viable educational option then you are at a severe disadvantage.

But even having made it to a Higher Education faciltiy as an other-non-manual worker background student the odds are still stacked against you. The other-non-manual group has a drop out rate of 17 per cent compared to the average of about 10%.

And considering for a moment other demographic groups as marginalised we see that the dropout rates are particularly high among those from non-employed backgrounds (three-in-ten), raising questions over the adequacy of supports (financial and otherwise) at HE to assist those from disadvantaged backgrounds in meeting the costs of fully participating in college life and integrating into the full range of student (academic and non-academic) activities. As noted above this will not improve with the cutting of the maintenace grant or the dropping of the millenium partnership fund.

The Govt. will plead lack of funds but its not solely an issue of funds as repeatedly students noted the secondary school phenomenon of the "honours class" being streamed for extra attention with the remaining students getting infrequent or unenthousiastic attention. Career guidance was frequently absent and there was a demonstrable lack of understanding regarding financial considerations among students. The resolution of these issues or at the least a serious contribution to resolvlng them does not require significant sums of money.

Instead of spending money the govt. could consider ways of ensuring that the negative associations created around learning need to tackled from the very start. The cycle of exclusion needs to be broken and once broken that process of change can become self sustaining.

What is Sinn Fein’s policy for increasing particpation by certain demographic groups in further education. In the 6 counties what have we done to push this issue? Well the tackling of the 11plus is a big effort. The fairly twisted practice of sorting kids at 11 years old is surely one of the most restrictive obstacles facing equality of opportunity in the north of this country. Its not proving an easy road to travel but its a worthwhile one. And down here in the other state the party's push for universal childcare, calls for the provision of adult education free to all up to third level qualifications, the abolition of part-time fees and grant part-time students eligibility for maintenance grants; and third level access programmes for schools with a low take-up of places are all solid ideas to change the socio-economic dynamic that is forcing one section of society further and further into the margins.

The danger is that the non-manual workers and indeed other workers will become trapped in a type of structural unemployment - a whole segment of society left behind in the so called knowledge economy and all because nobody was willing to break the cycle of exclusion.

As was noted before here Working class kids aint thick. They just have more obstacles to overcome than most. Its about time some one gave them some support and I cant see Brian Hayes or Mary Coughlan doing anything to help.

Details emerge of Budget 2010's brutal education cuts

http://www.anphoblacht.com/news/detail/39407

Details emerge of Budget 2010's brutal education cuts





Budget 2010 saw yet another attack on one of our most vital public services, education, and in so doing has again foisted most of the burden on disadvantaged and vulnerable students.

This is not the first time such a savage budget was imposed on the education sector, with previous budgets resulting in higher class sizes, increased third-level registration fees, axing of special needs classes and cuts to schools in the most disadvantaged areas in the 26 Counties.

This time round the school building budget has again been cut, despite the dire circumstances in which many schools find themselves. Third-level grants have also been slashed, which will affect thousands of grant recipients.
An overall cut of just over 5% will be administered by the Minister for Education and Science Batt O’Keeffe this year.

Our education system is already chronically underfunded. Indeed, proper investment was never made even when the money was there. Because of this the 26-County education system ranks bottom of the barrel in the EU in terms of funding with one of the highest class sizes in Europe.

School buildings

Yet again, despite workers crying out for jobs in the construction industry, the government has failed abysmally to invest in a proper school buildings programme and instead shockingly has opted to cut the fund for new school buildings and repairs by a staggering 27%. Across the state schools are desperate for new buildings as well as vital repairs to old ones. They are not being listened to. Children are spending their school days in prefabs which in some cases pose a serious risk to their health as well as greatly affecting the quality of the education they receive.

Special education

A cut of 4% will be made to special education initiatives in primary schools as well as a 21% chop to the National Council for Special Education. These cuts will affect some of the most vulnerable schoolchildren – those with special needs. Already we have seen closures of special needs classes across the state, we now learn that up to 1,200 special needs assistants will be let go this year. This will have a huge and devastating affect on young vulnerable children who deserve an education as much as any other.

Third level

Budget 2010 implements a series of savage cuts to the third-level sector. This makes a mockery of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, which the government purports to support and is particularly insulting to students considering the excessive salaries of university heads, which is just €4,000 short of what a government minister earns, plus expenses.

Budget 2010 introduces measures for an overall reduction of 4% in provision for institutes of technology and universities. This will see students having to deal with diminished practical and tutorial supports, shorter library opening hours, overcrowded lecture halls and limited access to labs. The recent fiasco in Dublin Institute of Technology whereby labs were cancelled, student services were severely curtailed and libraries services cut shows just how badly an effect a cut like this will have.

The Budget also introduces a 5% cut to the Student Maintenance Grant.
This will come into effect immediately and will affect new and existing grantholders. It is estimated that around 60,000 students per year avail of this grant. With the cost of going to college for a year estimated at being anywhere in the region of €7,000 to €8,000, this will mean that thousands of students literally wont be able to afford to go on to higher education and will end up on the dole queues.

Targeting the disadvantaged:

As has been the general theme throughout the lifetime of this government as far as cuts are concerned, it is the least well off who are the biggest target and this has been maintained in this year’s education budget.
The Millennium Partnership Fund, which provides financial assistance for further and higher education students who are experiencing financial difficulties while attending college, has through Budget 2010 been discontinued. A student applies to this fund to help them with either temporary or ongoing financial difficulties and it has been a lifeline for many third-level students struggling to get by. The discontinuation of this important scheme will result in many pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds being unable to carry on with their studies.
Budget 2010 makes for the removal of eligibility for student support grants for those in receipt of the Back to Education Allowance and Vocational Training Schemes allowances. Far from encouraging young people who are out of work to take up training schemes this measure effectively makes it so that if young people do take up training they will lose all their money. This is a nonsensical measure and will penalise, not encourage, young people to take up training courses. As well as this, allowances to participants in Vocational Training Schemes, Youthreach and Senior Travellers Training Centres will also be reduced.

Other cuts to education implemented in Budget 2010


Reduction of €8 million to Strategic Innovation Fund.
Allowances to participants in VTOS, Youthreach and Senior Travellers Training Centres to be reduced.
Teacher in-service education to be cut by 26%.
The supply teacher scheme at primary level will cease from the start of the 2010/11 school year.
Funding reduced by €1.2 million in 2010 for projects in Local Drugs Task Force areas in Dublin City and County and will be phased out completely in 2011.

CUT: The government has failed abysmally to invest in a proper school buildings programme

Are working class kids just thick? Or do we need to really take a radical look at how to tackle educational disadvantage

A friend of mine passed on this article to me regarding a radical functioning policy initiative to tackle the chronic underachievement of working class kids in the school system. This problem is as bad here as it is in many countries throughout the world, but politicians are unwilling to really attack the problem.

Sinn Féin in the North have certainly made efforts to try and make changes, but the experience of England is that the removal of the 11+ will not on its own solve the problems faced by working class kids. A more radical approach is required if we truly wish to see children from predominantly working class areas reaching their full potential.

Anyway below is a large chunk of the article. if you wish to read it in full go to
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-from-north-carolina-a-model-of-how-to-transform-education-1803563.html

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Did you know that there are more children getting into Oxbridge every year from the pool of 300 kids at Eton than from the 300,000 kids (in England) on free school meals. Either you believe those Etonians are born smarter – an absurd proposition – or our school system is failing poor children on a vast scale. How many great minds are we allowing to atrophy just because they weren't born to wealth?

It doesn't have to be like this. A far better system is possible; we just need to follow the evidence. And the road-map runs through – of all places – North Carolina. Something extraordinary has been happening in the state's schools over the past few decades, and the best guide to this experiment is an important new book by Professor Gerald Grant called Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

He looks at two very similar cities – Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level – while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?

He looks at two very similar cities – Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level – while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?

Raleigh's governors decided to do something bold and unconventional: they looked to the scientific evidence. In 1966, Professor James Coleman was commissioned by the White House to conduct the largest study, to that time, of what makes good pupils succeed and bad pupils fail. After years of on-the-ground analysis, he came up with something nobody expected. He found that the single biggest factor determining whether you do well at school or not isn't your parents, your teachers, your school buildings or your genes. It was, overwhelmingly, the other kids sitting in the classroom with you. If a critical mass of them are demotivated, pissed off and disobedient, you won't learn much. But if a critical mass of them are hard-working, keen and stick to the rules, you will probably learn. Watch any 10-year-old: they are little machines for snuffling out the sensitivities of their peer group, and conforming to them.

Facing their schools' failure in the 1980s, the Raleigh school board returned to this evidence and tried to puzzle out: how should it change the way we run our schools? Touring the schools, they could see why the research was right. Children from poor families need more help than kids from rich families. They are more likely to have chaotic home lives, less likely to have the importance of education drilled into them from birth, and they have lower expectations for themselves.

In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school's pupils, the teachers can't cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.

So they formulated a bold – and strikingly simple – solution. They wouldn't allow any school, by law, to have more than 40 per cent of its children on free school meals, or more than 25 per cent of children who were a grade below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the children who needed the most help wouldn't be lumped together where their problems would become insurmountable; they would be broken up and fanned out across the educational system. Raleigh merged its school system with white suburban Wake County, so they became one entity, sharing pupils. In order to soothe suburban suspicion at this change, Raleigh turned a third of its inner-city schools into specialist academies, offering excellent music or drama or language specialisms. Soon, children were bussing in both directions every morning, in and out of the suburbs.

Many conservatives savaged the plan as "social engineering" and said it was doomed to fail. Some parents were angry, and a few decamped for the private school system – until the results came in. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.

It's not hard to see why. Each school had a core majority who respected the rules and valued education – and the other kids normalised to their standards. Those who found it tough could now be given special attention, because they weren't any longer surrounded by a mass of equally troubled kids. Today, 94 per cent of parents in Raleigh say they are happy with their child's education. School boards supporting this integration keep getting re-elected.

Raleigh succeeded because it built genuinely comprehensive schools: in which rich, middle-class and poor kids learned together. In Britain, we tell ourselves we have built "comprehensives" – but, except in a few enclaves, we have done nothing of the sort.

We allocate school places according to how close you live to a school. This immediately creates a social apartheid where middle-class children have successful schools in leafy suburbs, while poorer children are ring-fenced in sink schools and end up at Tesco at 16 with few useable skills. (Rich children are creamed off entirely into private schools.) Comprehensivisation didn't fail; it didn't happen.

There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian – and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools in which just one per cent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country.

So we know how to make schools work: integrate them. Occasionally, our politicians take a tiny step that brings us closer to this. The Labour council in Brighton allocates school places by lottery; the Tories say they will abandon catchment areas, letting a few poor kids slip through. But both only tinker at the extreme social segregation that crowbars apart the educational system.

Integration is a good policy for bleak recession times since it delivers dramatic improvements at little extra cost. Raleigh actually spends less than the US national average on its schools, and 25 per cent less per pupil than failing Syracuse. In the long term, integration actually saves us a fortune in welfare payments and prevented crime.

Yes, the right will scream at first that it is "an attack on the middle class". In fact, it is a great compliment to the middle class: it wants to use their children and their values as the sun around which every child's education revolves. Yes, some parents will scream that they don't want their kids being taught alongside "chavs" and "pikeys". This should be called out bluntly – it is bigotry.

A democracy is based on a bargain: every child gets a chance to succeed, whatever their background. Today, we are breaking our deal. We are leaving millions of children to fail, just because their parents didn't have money. Do we want to be a country where our children are sorted at five into different playgrounds according to Daddy's bank account? Do we want to be an place where rich children only glimpse poor children from the car window as they are driven to their better, plusher school, and their better, plusher lives? Or do we want something better for our kids?

Our politicians insist that "we're all in this together". This will only be true if – at last, and at least – our children go to school together.

j.hari@independent.co.uk