Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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68. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if consideration will be given to increasing funding for primary schools to align that funding to the OECD average; if consideration will be given to providing primary schools with a consistent funding schedule in order to help them better budget; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [29897/24]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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My Department’s voted estimate for capital and current expenditure for 2024 stands at €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. 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 Deputy has referenced the OECD average investments in education, as set out in 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 gov.ie website.

This paper outlines how the very significant variation (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 and is available as a continuous series 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 Department of Education 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 favourably 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.

In regard to the question on a consistent funding schedule, I can confirm that I am committed to providing schools at both primary and post-primary level with as much detail regarding grants, grant amounts and expected payment timeframes for each academic year as far in advance as is practicable.

For the 2024/25 academic year, officials in the Department of Education are currently considering the presentation of schedules for grants across primary and post-primary sectors.