Minister accused of stealing €10m from schools in Ireland

Flúirse Education Solutions calls on Minister for Education and Science to give back some 10 million euro lost to schools in the continued delay to release any funding from the 252 million euro, promised before last year’s election, for investment in ICT and computers in Irish schools.

Teachers, children and parents across Ireland should call for further funding for investing in computers, broadband and software in Irish classrooms immediately, according to Tomás Finneran, co-founder and Director of Flúirse Education Solutions, a company based in Kerry specialising in providing tailored educational resources for parents, teachers and children of primary schools throughout Ireland. By continuing to withhold the 252 million euro promised before last year’s election, for investment in ICT in Education, the minister has saved the substantial figure of 10 million euro when the rate of annual inflation is taken into consideration. In other words, the long awaited investment is already worth 10 million euro less in real terms.

“We have waited patiently for over a year and still Irish schools have not received one penny in funding from the 252 million euro allocated to them under the National Development Plan,” explained Tomás Finneran. “The minister was very quick to announce this funding 13 months ago as we edged closer to a general election. Once the election was over, she managed to buy some time by shifting the responsibility to a working group, charged with the task of suggesting how best to allocate the funding. We then had the crazy situation whereby the findings from this group were not published, even though they had concluded their work last summer. Now that their findings are finally available, thanks to a leak of a draft copy of their report, the Minister cannot make any further excuses.”

The reports findings, according to yesterday’s Irish Times, broadly echo what Flúirse and many other organisations in the education sector have been stating consistently since the announcement of the investment as part of the National Development Plan 2007 – 2013. “We were one of the first organisations to acknowledge that this funding was inadequate and that it would fail to bring our education system even close to the EU average.”

Funding for ICT in UK schools averages over 100 euro per child and this investment has been sustained for many years, as the UK government joins most other Education systems in neighbouring countries in embracing technology to enhance education and teaching. Finneran believes that Ireland will continue to lag far behind these countries. “It was clear to us before any report was published, that the 252 million euro allocated so sparsely across both the primary and secondary levels would equate to little more than 40 euro for every child. We’re not looking for funding to sustain or improve the ICT infrastructure in our schools, we’re actually looking for investment to establish this infrastructure.”

Flúirse is in existence for less than 3 years and yet has managed to be at the forefront of ICT in Education in Ireland. The company has consistently campaigned on behalf of the primary school sector for increased investment from the government, to fund the introduction of an ICT infrastructure in each classroom in the country. “We certainly believe that the private sector has a duty to support our education system. Just before Christmas we donated almost €200,000 worth of educational software to disadvantaged schools. We’re providing one of the largest programmes of summer courses for primary school teachers this July to assist teachers with little or no experience, to gain valuable skills in computing, website design and many other essential skills that are not available to them anywhere else. But companies like ours alone cannot be responsible for bringing the Irish education system into the 21^st century, we need leadership and backing from this government immediately”

Finneran highlighted what he sees as a growing legacy of failures to deliver on promises by the current Minister for Education and Science. “Minister Hanafin laughed last year when it was proposed that laptop computers be given to secondary school students to assist them in their learning. Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Department of Education delivered 20,000 laptop computers to every school in the North. She reassured our teachers before the election about their fears of over-crowding in our classrooms, yet she now accepts that reducing the average teacher-student ratio is not possible in the foreseeable future. It is time for this Minister to start delivering on her promises, to start listening to the genuine cries of help from within our creaking education system and it is time for this Minister to start to value the most important part of any country’s future: its children.”