Catherine Murphy
Ceist:195. Deputy Catherine Murphy asked the Minister for Education her plans to align primary education funding with the OECD average [27088/24]
Amharc ar fhreagraTuesday, 25 June 2024
Ceisteanna (195)
Freagraí scríofa
As the Deputy will be aware, my Department’s voted estimate for capital and current expenditure for 2024 stands at over €10.9 billion. This represents an increase of over €2.8 billion or 35% since 2019. This is the third largest budget across Government, and the largest ever investment in our schools. This indicates the strong commitment to investment in education by this Government.
In the lead up to the 2025 Budget, as Minister for Education, I will continue to deliver on the priorities outlined in the Programme for Government and to continue to support the students, staff and families in the education sector. As I am sure the Deputy appreciates, it would not be appropriate for me to outline any more specific plans at this stage of the Budgetary process but over the last four years, I have delivered substantial increases in investment in our Education system, and I remain committed to this vision of a world class education system for all.
The OECD average, as referenced by the Deputy, is taken from the annual ‘OECD Education at a Glance’ report. This report uses GDP as the base against which to compare investment in education across different OECD members. As the Deputy will be aware, senior academics and other independent analysts have raised questions regarding the use of GDP as the most appropriate measure of the size of the Irish economy. To assist with this, my department published a paper on this matter in October 2022 to assist users of these statistics to understand this issue. This paper is available on www.gov.ie under OECD briefing notes.
This paper outlines how the very large increase of 34% in GDP between 2014 and 2015 raised questions about the usefulness of GDP as an accounting standard for Ireland and its distorting effects on measures such as spend per capita on education. In order to help in analysis of the Irish macroeconomy and in the derivation of other such development indicators, a special measure, GNI-Star (GNI*), which excludes these distorting factors by (for example) excluding the net profits of companies that have been sent abroad, rather than staying in the Irish economy. GNI* has been calculated by the Central Statistics Office (2016) and is available as a continuous series (alongside GDP) from 1995. For context, according to the CSO, in 2021 GNI* was about 30 per cent below the level of GDP. An indication of the more appropriate value of GNI* versus GDP is that GNI* is now being used instead of GDP in national policy for example, the National Development Plan, 2021-2030. The Department of Finance uses GNI* in meeting the Government’s European budgetary requirements with debt-to-GNI* figures rather than debt-to-GDP.
The briefing paper referenced above outlines how, using the alternative measure of GNI*, education expenditure in 2020 as a percentage of GNI* stood at 5.8%. This compares favorably to the OECD average for education expenditure as a percentage of national income, which stood at 5.1% in 2020. The document also looks at Ireland’s spend on education as a percentage of total Government spending and this also compares well internationally.