The Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP) has launched a campaign and
petition to reduce the cost to parents arising from unnecessary new
schoolbook editions.
A family with four children can spend as much as €3,200 on secondary
school books alone and many cannot be reused so SVP is asking people to
sign a petition calling on the Minister for Education and Skills to set
up an effective national book rental scheme.
“The constant flow of unnecessary new editions means that families
are forced to keep forking out for new texts, while tonnes of books end
up dumped. It’s crazy – and unnecessary,” said Mairead Bushnell, SVP
National President.
“Education is a right, and it’s supposed to be free. But Ireland is
one of only a few European countries to make even the poorest pay for
books. It’s a shocking burden on hard-pressed families,” she said.
SVP pointed out that in most European countries, schools run
schoolbook rental schemes where schools buy the books and rent or loan
them out to students in return for a small fee or deposit.
This means
that teachers can set a book and be sure that there are enough copies
for all their students.
A book rental scheme would help every family in
Ireland, and reduce the unnecessary spend on new schoolbook editions
each year.
At the moment the Department of Education and Skills gives money to
schools to spend on books, but the schools do not have to set up a book
rental scheme.
If funding for books only went to schools that had book
rental schemes, more schools would set them up.
Frequent new revisions
would become a thing of the past as the books could be reused.
The Society of St Vincent de Paul regularly sees families struggling
to deal with the costs of preparing for a new school term.
SVP spends
just under €4m per annum supporting families with a range of education
costs.
It wants to see a change in policy on schoolbooks that would
lift some of this burden or have it removed from families altogether.
Research carried out last year by RTÉ stated that parents feel they
are sitting ducks when it comes to school books. One parent said that
out of 17 books for her child, just two did not have any workbook
component. Once workbooks are filled in the book cannot be re-used and
sold on at the end of the year.
In UK, parents do not pay anything at all for schoolbooks, at either
primary or second level. Lithuania is the same, and in Finland and in
France, parents pay nothing towards schoolbooks until the child is 16,
and at senior cycle (same as our Leaving Certificate) they pay for
books.
In Italy, books are free at primary level and parents pay in secondary.
In Spain, as in Ireland, parents pay for schoolbooks.
In recent years there has been some suggestions, like those made by
the head of the Irish Maths Teachers' Association, Donal Coughlan, that
resource material be available in a digital format for all subjects
(at very little cost) as it is for at least some of the new Project
Maths curriculum.
Unelected Seanad candidate James Doorley from Ashbourne, Co Meath
also raised the issue in his campaign earlier this year. He quoted
Barnardos estimates last year that the average back to school cost per
student were €815. He said he had raised this in meetings with the
Department of Education and Skills and they informed him that that they
leave it up to individual schools to decide which editions to use and
when to change editions.
He said that the State is contributing €15m towards the schoolbook
rental scheme, but that is undermined if the editions are changed
regularly because there is no point in renting out books that are no
longer in use.
He also suggested that the long-term solution is to move towards
ebooks and supporting all schools to go digital.
In the meantime,
however, as families try to cope on less income there is an opportunity
for the new Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairi Quinn to engage
with all stakeholders to reduce costs for parents and seek better value
for the taxpayer for the money invested., he suggested .
He added that publishers also need to be challenged when they produce new editions with minor changes that are unnecessary.
The petition is available at www.svp.ie/books