Education rights a key to Budget dilemma

Charlie McCreevy is about as likely to ban horse racing and banish bookies from our shores as he is to take advice from this column. But perhaps if one of his handlers could disguise it as an article from the Economist or the Wall Street Journal, he might pay attention to a modest proposal that could help him with the key Budget problem.

His biggest difficulty is squaring the need to control inflation with trade union demands for real benefits for their members. Between the rock and the hard place there is room for some imaginative thinking. And there is at least one concrete measure that would have huge implications for social justice with no consequences for inflation. Anyone who thinks about the emergence of the new, wealthy Ireland is struck by a particular paradox. In 40 years we have undergone what amounts to a social revolution. A new economy has replaced the old. On the other hand, that revolution has left the distribution of privilege intact. To an extraordinary degree, the children and grandchildren of those doing well for themselves in the 1950s are still doing well. Conversely, the children and grandchildren of those at the bottom of the heap are still, for the most part, just where they were 40 years ago.

The explanation is simple: education. The economic revolution replaced an old social hierarchy based on family property (the farm, the shop, the pub) with one based on educational qualifications (a good Leaving Cert, a BA, a PhD in electrical engineering). The sons and daughters of the farmers, shopkeepers and publicans adapted brilliantly, transforming the physical capital of property into the cultural capital of education. But on the whole the sons and daughters of the factory workers, office cleaners and bus-drivers were not able to adapt as well to the new environment. Since education is essentially paid for by the State, this meant the kind of State spending used to redistribute privilege in most of the rest of Europe was used, in Ireland, to sustain and reinforce privilege. That, in essence, is why we now have a deeply unequal society in which, after decades of massive public spending on schools and colleges, a quarter of the population is functionally illiterate and a young person from a poor background has a better chance of seeing the inside of a prison or a psychiatric hospital than of a university.

With the arrival of high-profile programmes to combat the effects of social disadvantage in schools it is easy to suppose the State is now spending more on educating poor people than on the better off. But this is not so. The children of the poor make up the vast bulk of those who drop out of school before completing the Leaving Certificate. They are also, as a report by Prof Patrick Clancy for the Higher Education Authority showed last week, still vastly less likely to enter third-level education. Their absence saves the State a lot of money.

THE gap can be measured in simple financial terms. If you complete four years of third-level education, the State will have spent about £46,000 on your education. If you leave school early the figure will be less than half of that, about £19,500. The young person most in need of State support gets about £25,000 less of it than a more comfortable contemporary. The evidence would suggest the gap is likely to grow, as a buoyant job market draws more young people from poorer backgrounds into short-term, badly-paid jobs.

Which brings us to the proposal that might help Charlie McCreevy out of a hole. The idea has been around for a while, and argued cogently by the education commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland in submissions on adult education. It is that each citizen should have the same entitlement to education, whether he or she has gone straight through from primary to third-level or not. From that principle follows a logical but, in the Irish context, quite radical step.

If we accept that everyone has an equal right to education, then let's put a figure on what that right means to someone who is in a position to take advantage of it. Take, for example, the average cost of educating someone up to the level of a primary degree in an Irish university: around £45,000. Then let's say that everyone is therefore entitled to at least £45,000 worth of education. If you've got your degree, fine. But if you dropped out at 15, then you have, say, £25,000 left in your personal education fund, to use that money for whatever kind of second-chance education seems best to you.

Implementing this idea would have obvious effects. It would provide very many of the people represented by the trade unions and community groups with a tangible but non-inflationary benefit. Getting a letter telling you that you have £25,000 to spend on your own education would be a dramatic reminder of what those who have lost out are missing. Even for those who did not take up their entitlements, putting a figure on what they have lost might provide an encouragement to think carefully about the fate of their own children. The economy, of course, would benefit enormously from increasing the general levels of education and training within the working population.

As things stand, the Government has published a good White Paper on Adult Education and is planning to spend an additional £200 million more in six years. But there is still no acceptance that everyone the system has failed should have a right to a second chance. The White Paper argues, perversely, that the very scale of the failure is such that we can't afford to redress it: the number of adults in the population with low levels of education is simply too large. So long as that kind of thinking forms the basis of official attitudes, the gap between the entitlements of the well off and the poor will remain too large for appeals along the lines of "We're all in this together" to be feasible.