This week many parents will be handed a book list that will punch a gaping hole in the family budget. The children’s charity Barnardos says its research puts the annual cost of school books at anything from €100 to €250 per child. Despite 20 years of promises to reduce the cost to parents, this year’s bills look set to be as high as ever.

What’s more, tablet computers, which we trusted to slash costs once parents had bought the hardware, have not delivered savings. Ebooks have proved just as expensive as their paper equivalents.

This month charities dealing with family poverty went before an Oireachtas committee and asked the Department of Education to help reduce the cost of books. Barnardos’ chief executive, Fergus Finlay, called the marketing of expensive disposable workbooks a disgrace.

Since becoming Minister for Education, Ruairí Quinn has made a number of announcements about his intention to rebalance the books, and a code of practice is now in place to guide publishers. Members of the Irish Educational Publishers’ Association have pledged to leave school books unchanged for six years at a time, so they can be sold on and reused within that period, and to leave older versions in print.

The book-price story took a twist at the weekend with allegations that Folens, a big Irish educational publisher, prints a significant proportion of its books abroad, some by a company in India with very poor working conditions and pay. But in Ireland some of its school-book prices are increasing. Folens acknowledges that it prints a significant number of books abroad but says more than half are printed in Ireland. It defends its position, saying it has no print jobs with the Indian company, Manipal, at the moment and “no existing plans” to deal with it in the future. Folens says it is investigating the allegations and “will not consider placing any other printing work with the company in question until the investigation is completed”; it also defends what it calls a “modest price review”.

In the meantime, schools have been advised on how to set up book-rental schemes, which can radically reduce the cost of books to parents. But figures from the publishers’ assocation show no drop in book prices, and Barnardos says that, according to its data, the cost of school books is as high as ever.

Raw figures
The raw figures speak for themselves. The school-book market is worth €55 million a year. The department provides €15 million towards the purchase of books in disadvantaged schools. That's €40 million Irish parents must fork out again this year. It's a huge amount – and not a burden that parents in neighbouring areas are expected to bear. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, schools get a budget to supply books to children, normally as loans. The schools select and pay for the titles they want to use. The result? Value for money is a high priority.

Here, schools choose the books and parents pay. Teachers select titles according to a range of criteria, including recommendations from colleagues, books’ production values and their publishers’ marketing abilities. Cost is not always high on the agenda, as schools are not the ones paying.

Teachers have also been identified as driving the rise of the workbook – a costly, single-use item that has become a fixture on Irish book lists over the past 20 years. Educational publishers devised the workbook, but teachers made it an educational staple, says Cliodhna O’Donoghue of the publishers’ association. “The market is dictated by what teachers want,” she says. “There is continuing demand from teachers for workbooks because, in mixed-ability groups, teachers can set children workbook activities and then deal with other groups. If they weren’t popular we wouldn’t keep producing them.”

There’s a parallel between the cost of books to parents and the cost of drugs to patients. Teachers, like GPs, are subject to marketing pressures and have no real incentive to choose the cheapest option – the copybook – just as GPs have no real incentive to choose generic over branded drugs.

Can teachers be blamed for choosing material they believe will keep children engaged? The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation says dropping workbooks doesn’t necessarily cut costs. “The issue of workbooks is something schools have been dealing with for years,” says Sheila Nunan, the INTO’s general secretary. “Many schools have dropped them over the years. But replacing them with photocopying increased or at best simply converted the cost.”

The cost of photocopying is showing up in rising voluntary parental contributions. Schools are sensitive to costs, says Nunan. “More and more schools do not allow writing on the texts, so that they can be passed on. Children do the work in copies or orally, so that a €14-€20 textbook is not discarded after one year. Increasingly, school policy on books is just that, a school-based policy, rather than the choice of the teacher. In most primary schools these books are the property of the school and rented by parents, so there is no writing in them.”

It has been 20 years since the Department of Education commissioned a study of school-book costs, and little has changed since then. In 1994 Cooney Carey recommended book-rental schemes, led by the Department, for all schools. The department has issued guidelines only now. In the meantime primary schools in particular have been independently proactive, and about three-quarters have already put schemes in place. Progress at second level has been slower, with fewer than half of postprimary schools operating schemes.

The problem at postprimary level is more acute. Workbooks are less of a feature, but students starting exam cycles are faced with lists of very expensive subject books, as well as past papers, study notes and revision aids.

The schools that operate book-rental schemes at this level tend to be in the VEC, community and comprehensive sectors. Voluntary schools run by religious orders and fee-paying schools are far less likely to operate rental schemes.

Given that these schemes can save parents up to 80 per cent of the cost of school books, universal application would make a big difference. The department issued its guidelines only this year, so it will take time to measure the response of schools and the cost implications for parents.

Digital content
In the meantime, the landscape is changing. More and more schools are turning to digital content, and the use of ebooks is on the rise. The Irish Educational Publishers' Association has invested significant amounts in the development of digital content, but the eradication of printing costs is not reaching the consumer.

The publishers’ discount for ebooks is just 30 per cent, and VAT at 23 per cent wipes out even that saving. “Millions are being invested in ICT infrastructure in schools, while the most this VAT could bring in is €10 million,”says O’Donoghue.

There’s a strong argument for dropping VAT, but the EU VAT directive says all digitised publications, including ebooks, online newspaper subscriptions and online information services, are liable to standard rate VAT. There is no option to exempt ebooks. France and Luxembourg reduced rates for ebooks, but the European Commission took them to the European Court of Justice for infringement of the directive.

So there is no immediate relief in sight when it comes to printed or digital school books. The best parents can hope for is for all schools to set up book-rental schemes.

Perhaps if more parents put pressure on school management boards, or volunteered to run rental schemes, they could achieve savings that two decades of education ministries have failed to deliver.

Book-rental schemes: One school's experience
"We started our book-rental scheme four years ago. About 60 per cent of the parents opted in. It was an expensive process at the beginning, but the cost has fallen each year.

“We choose the books in consultation with staff, and we have a broker who goes to the publishers and gets all the titles for us, so we don’t have to deal with them directly. The broker also gets us a 10 per cent discount on the overall cost.

“While cost wouldn’t be top of the agenda for the teachers when they are selecting titles, the management of the school is conscious of price, so we try to keep them low where we can. We are phasing out workbooks gradually in most areas.

“We have asked the teachers not to change titles for five years, to facilitate the rental scheme, but have a fund for changing titles in case a book is not working out, as can sometimes happen.

“The overall cost of buying the books in the first year was around €19,000. We covered a quarter of that with the book grant from the Department of Education. Since then the cost has come in somewhere between €3,000 and €5,000. Before the scheme the annual cost of books was up to €130. Now it’s around €30 per child.

"Four years on, 98 per cent of the parents have signed up."
Bernadette Kehoe
Principal, Harold's Cross National School, Dublin


Going digital: Is it practical yet?
"When we we brought iPads into the classroom, some years ago, we did it with the intention of replacing paper books altogether, but the reality is that we haven't been able to do that," says Anne Dowling, principal of Rathdown School for Girls, in Glenageary, Co Dublin, one of the first schools in the country to introduce tablet computers.

“There are a number of reasons why the paperless classroom has not materialised. For starters, the educational publishers have a way to go before the full suite of Irish titles are available as ebooks.

“The reality is that we can only use the iPads for certain activities as a very useful complement to traditional books,” says Dowling. “They are wonderful for creating video content and playing digital games around language learning, for example. However, the ebooks that we have are not interactive and not compatible for use with our technology. We have not asked parents to buy the ebook titles. We had hoped to replace books, but I think we will have to wait until the publishers are ready.”