Summary of ideas submitted in the Education category…

• Review salary scales for university lecturers
• Ring fence the revenue from a 2c tax on text messages for education
• Rooms in schools should be leased to parents or child minders for after school homework/minding services.
• RTE should make a one hour (government funded) programme on how economics work, what has happened to the Irish and world economies, why the problem has become exacerbated, and how every person on the street can contribute to our national economic recovery.
• Run those modules of Electronic and Computer Engineering courses that are not general engineering modules over the summer months.
• Save €1m per annum on unnecessary emails in universities and colleges
• Save money by standardising school construction designs.
• School Boards of Management fund the costs of applying for planning permission to speed up the process.
• School buildings and grounds should be used during the summer months for summer camps for children and for local community activities
• Scrap the teaching council.
• Secondary teachers should not get paid extra to mark exam papers or sit in at exam time.
• Set up a course to enable parents to act as supervisors in schools.
• Set up a single, National Central Research Institution with “branches” in each university.
• Set up entertainment camps to occupy kids during summer months.
• Share IT resources between second and third level education.
• Start a back to education project for under-23s
• Start a database of people willing to give classes to adults
• Start converting primary schools to Irish-speaking Bunscoils
• Start examining areas for streamlining secondary system. For example, teachers who finish before June must supervise exams until the end of June.
• Strive to become the most technology-literate country in the world,
• Students could do voluntary work in lieu of third level fees.
• Suspend transition year.
• Tackle illiteracy in primary schools.
• Task teams need to be sent to schools to empower teachers in the use of ICT in education. They should be spearheaded by technologically competent and passionate people who can demonstrate how technology can enhance teaching and learning
• Teach basic child-rearing skills to teenagers while they’re still in school.
• Teach children how to speak/debate for a number of minutes. This will nurture their self-confidence.
• Teach conversational Irish as a recreational subject
• Teach entrepreneurship in our schools
• Teach more than one foreign language to students in both primary and secondary schools.
• Teach school children the real value of money by providing them with the opportunity to ‘manage’ a family budget
• Teach schoolchildren ways of developing personal wealth.
• Teachers should not be paid allowances for supervision of children on breaks.
• The costs of ‘upskilling’ type people in employment should be offset by tax reliefs.
• The Government should act as a guarantor to schools who can obtain a mortgage from their local banks
• The government should allocate resources to private training companies to train the recently unemployed.