Search

This paper is based on the recollections of its author of the work of the Investment in Education team from its inauguration in summer 1962 until the completion of its work in early 1965. The author was a research assistant to the team throughout the period of the study and was directly involved in the collection and analysis of the data on which the findings of the report were based. The paper describes the conditions under which the team operated. It adverts to some of the contentious issues which arose out of the data analysis. It explores the evolving roles of the Steering Committee, of senior civil servants in the Department of Education and of the chairman and of individual members of the team during the two-and-a-half-year period. It discusses some of the external influences which impacted on members of the team and explores how the changing economic and cultural life of Ireland in the early 1960s affected their thinking. It touches on the setting up of the Development Branch in the Department of Education in 1966 and its premature disbandment by the Minister Richard Burke in 1973. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of the relationship between education and economic development focus on the line of causation running from the former to the latter. The present paper studies how the pattern of Irish development has influenced the structure of the Irish education system. The first section sets out the economic context of late industrialisation within whichInvestment in Educationwas commissioned in 1962 and how it influenced the reception that the report received. The report's release would be followed shortly thereafter by a series of policy measures that would expand secondary-school enrolment and graduation rates and massively increase the demand for third-level places. Later sections analyse the subsequent evolution of Ireland's binary system of tertiary education and the recent attention devoted to science, technology and innovation policy and the ‘fourth-level’ (postgraduate) sector. Concluding comments focus on the continuing relevance of the perspective embodied inInvestment in Educationfor the surprisingly high numbers who continue to leave the Irish education system without a leaving certificate qualification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]