"Where you live determines how long you stay in school" declares a headline in the Irish Independent. Well who'da thunk it? A study for the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee shows that three out of five people aged 15 and over in Finglas and Ballymun left school with only the Junior Cert or lower. By contrast the best educated Dubliners live in Rathmines, closely followed by Ballsbridge, Merrion and Sandymount. Yeah we know all that is the obvious response to such findings but there is something positive in the fact that this sort of data gets into the public domain and is widely reported and Education Correspondent John Walsh's story in the Indo is on the front page.
The correlation between class position and educational outcome has been established in the academic literature for some time. Breen, Hannan, Rottman and Whelan in Understanding Contemporary Ireland published back in 1990 concluded that "those who have gained most from educational reform have been middle class..." Other studies can be seen here, here and here.
Walsh has another piece inside the paper that explicitly deals with the policy implications of such findings, in particular the Back to Work Educational Allowance (BETA). His take is that the the previous Social Affairs Minister, Mary Coughlan, who was "pilloried" for making it harder for people to get BETA, may have done the right thing. He explains that prior to the change people only had to be unemployed for 6 months to avail of the scheme. By changing it to 15 months the scheme was in a better position to help achieve its objective in helping the long term unemployed.
According to an unpublished survey by the Department of Social Affairs, only one third of those getting BETA were in receipt of social welfare for more than two years. 54 percent were getting payments for less than a year and 20 percent for less than six months. Walsh argues that while some long term unemployed were helped, the unemployed middle classes did particularly well out of it. He believes that many deliberately signed on the dole for a few months so they could then go to college and study for degrees. Walsh reports that Coughlan's successor, Seamus Brennan, is to tweak the rules again but with important qualifications so that the scheme won't again be "colonised" by the middle classes.
The City of Dublin VEC survey can now be used by the committee in its plans to target disadvantaged communities. All VECs are legally obliged to make such plans and would benefit from similar surveys. Nobody would question the importance of targeting scarce resources to meet the most pressing needs but if that perspective is underpinned by a new common sense that says we should not let the middle classes hijack such schemes, then this is a welcome development.
Comments