Education is vital to people’s personal development and life chances, to economic growth and productivity, to social prosperity and equality. But you wouldn’t think so when listening to pre-budget debates. Among our peer group in the EU (other high income countries), Ireland comes last in terms of educational investment – and it would take billions of Euros to catch up.
That’s according to the OECD’s recent Education at a Glance 2023. It utilises a helpful measurement: total expenditure per full-time equivalent student. This avoids problems with using GDP/GNI* as a benchmark as this doesn’t factor in youth demographic. For instance, in country A, young people make up a quarter of the population while in country B they make up only 15 percent. The two countries could both spend the same proportion of GDP on education but that would mean country A is underspending on education, given it has more children.
Of course, measuring the spend per student favours higher income countries. But as we are measuring like-with-like (other high-income EU countries) this is not so much an issue here.
So what is the OECD telling us (with the help of Eurostat’s data on pupil numbers to get a weighted average)? Let’s turn to primary education.
There’s Ireland – at the bottom of the investment table at primary level.
In 2020, we would have had to increase spending at primary level by 16 percent, or over €760 million. To reach the best performer – Denmark – we would have had to increase spending by nearly half, or a staggering €2.3 billion.
There are even a number of low-income EU countries that spend more than us per primary pupil: Estonia, Slovenia, and Italy with Portugal and Spain not far behind.
Turning to secondary education (lower and upper secondary education combined), we find a similar pattern.
There’s Ireland again – at the bottom of the table. However, in money terms we are further behind our peer-group average. To reach the average, we’d need to increase investment by 31 percent, or €1.4 billion. To reach the top performer – Austria – spending would have had to increase by €2.4 billion.
Regarding tertiary, or third-level, education, the OECD provides two measurements: one that includes Research & Development (R&D) and the other that excludes it.
When we exclude R&D, Ireland comes close to our peer group average, though it would still need to increase spending by over €450 million in 2020 to reach the best performer – Belgium.
However, we would need substantial increases if R&D were included: €600 million to reach our peer group average and €1.6 billion to reach Sweden, the best performer.
One final measurement: early childhood education. This is not an easily comparable sector. The OECD points out that early childhood education (ECE) services are ‘very diverse’ with variations in the targeted age groups, funding, governance, type of delivery (full-time or part-time), etc. Further, Ireland’s data reporting is spotty at best. The following combined spending on ECE and pre-primary and, even here, there may be different categorisation methodologies. Nonetheless, what data we do have is instructive.
Ireland is at the bottom of the table – by a considerable amount. While the magnitude may change with more robust data, this is not only consistent with investment in other educational levels, it corresponds with government data on ECE expenditure.
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In the last 10 years, Irish education expenditure has increased by over 40 percent, while total expenditure increased by 30 percent. So more resources have been directed into education.
However, as a proportion of national income, education expenditure has fallen during this same period and remained static over the last few years.
Investment in education doesn’t get the same airtime as, say, tax cuts – even though it is far more important for a prospering economy and society. We are essentially ‘shorting’ our future, suppressing necessary investment in education in order to facilitate tax cuts and a low-tax economy.
We would need to spend billions to reach the average of our peer group; billions more to reach the best performers. The first thing we need to do to show how out of step we are with other EU countries in our peer group.
Then we can start having a debate on issues that really matter.
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