LEFTFIELD:It has been a disastrous year all round, but some simple steps can be taken to improve educational prospects at third level

THIS TIME LAST year I was having a drink with some friends, and we were reminiscing about good and bad years we had experienced. We all agreed that 2009 had been terrible. What we didn’t realise was how much worse 2010 was going to be, or how all-pervading gloom was going to wrap itself round this country.

Indeed, as you look at the educational landscape right now, you would have to be mad not to be depressed. The PISA survey shows Ireland is slipping down the global league table of excellence in secondary education. The world rankings show Irish universities in decline. While education is not being hit quite as hard as some other public services, it nevertheless is being cut, and indeed third level is being cut more than primary or secondary.

Students are in revolt about the higher education “contribution”, or whatever we’re calling it, of €2,000 – which will not be enough to ward off financial catastrophe for some institutions. Key staff are being lost and cannot be replaced. An undead higher education strategic review (chaired by Colin Hunt) is waiting somewhere in the wings to scare us all with thoughts of more central control and greater bureaucracy.

As some readers know, I’m going to escape from all this in late March when I move to Scotland to become principal of the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. But that’s no consolation. Ireland is my family home, and what happens here matters to me. And so I have a wish list for 2011 of things that I believe can be done and which will make a difference to the future of education here, and maybe will even restore a sense of confidence and determination, without which we’ve had it.

First, let us shelve the Hunt strategic review. I know some people with the very best intentions spent a good bit of time on it, but the evidence is that it hasn’t produced a viable strategy for the future. Or perhaps we could extend its life, bringing in some additional people with real knowledge of higher education (to support the minority of members with that background), and commissioning some research so that its recommendations can be evidence-based rather than anecdote-inspired. Maybe the group can also be encouraged to believe that our main problem now is not the lack of centralised bureaucratic co-ordination.

Secondly, when the new government emerges after the election, it should separate third level from the rest of education in the new administration. The Department of Education is always going to focus on schools, and higher education can be seen as a distraction. When the going gets tough, it is third level that gets hit first and hardest. The sector needs its own government champion.

Thirdly, for the love of all that is good, abandon the wretched “employment control framework”, which is not helping the government in any of its objectives but is creating huge damage in the system. If this mad scheme (which restricts the ability of universities and colleges to recruit staff) continues, some university programmes that represent national priorities will shortly cease to be viable. Just tell the universities what their budget is, and then let them manage it without such micro-interference.

Fourthly, the universities themselves must tackle the huge problem posed by the CAO points system. This is distorting not just the distribution of university programmes, but also the Leaving Certificate curriculum and learning methods. It absolutely has to go, and for once this is not the Government’s responsibility, but that of the universities.

Finally, the universities must also agree on some measure of rationalisation, under which the provision of programmes is distributed more rationally. All universities will legitimately want to run certain courses, but some should be allocated to certain institutions only, and others should be run in collaboration and with shared resources. This has been the subject of discussions for some time, and these should now show results.

Bad and all as things look right now, we do have people who are well equipped to make things better. And who are these? There are more than I can mention, but here are some of the people who, I believe, represent our hopes for the future. The secretary general of the Department of Education, Brigid McManus; the chairman of the National Competitiveness Council and an excellent former chairman of the HEA, Don Thornhill; my successor as president of DCU, Prof Brian MacCraith; Labour’s education spokesperson Ruairí Quinn (with whom I don’t always agree, but who is an original thinker); Fianna Fáil’s Mary Hanafin, a politician who tells it as it is; and the massed ranks of academics who get criticised for under-performing but who actually work way beyond the call of duty.

And my villains? Whoever thought up the “employment control framework”; and all those who think that higher education policy should be developed on the back of anecdotes they heard in a pub about what goes on in universities, and who seem uninterested in carefully gathered evidence. Oh, and Mike Ashley, the owner of Newcastle United.

I am going into 2011 with optimism, but I sure as hell won’t miss 2010.

A happy Christmas to all of you.

Ferdinand von Prondzynski is a former president of Dublin City University