Grinds and the Myth of "Free Education" in the 26-Counties

A feature that defined my last academic year of secondary education was the supremacy of what is called “shadow education” or more commonly “Grinds,” which is increasingly accepted as an essential aspect of education in the 26 counties. Having attended the Irish Times Higher Options event in September of 2024, it was interesting for me to see the sheer size of the stalls that were purely dedicated to grinds teachers and private tuition companies. “Grinds 360”, one such company, even dwarfed the Trinity College stall, offering sales and handing out free books. This is a representation of the slow, covert privatisation of education in the South, done without the passing of a single word of legislation. Students who are struggling with their schoolwork, or need some extra help to get the grades needed for the university course they want, can no longer rely on their schools to provide this. They are increasingly forced to find private tutors, at often exorbitant costs.

According to the ESRI, 55% of secondary school students were actively taking Grinds in 2024. Comparatively, just 15% – 20% of students take grinds in Germany. In most countries, the purpose of Grinds is not to be a distinct ‘part’ of your education, but to supplement students who are aiming for high grades. However, the attitude prevailing in Ireland today is that grinds are the prerequisite to any academic success.

This pervasiveness of private grinds is a key distinction in education on either side of partition. A public education system was established in the 6-counties in the form of grammar and secondary schools following WWII, whereas the south would only formally introduce “free education” in 1957. This, however, came with the caveat that the majority of these schools would be in the hands of the Catholic Church, with little to no secular option offered.

This undue influence of the Catholic Church remains, yet a new issue is emerging; secondary schools in the south are increasingly unequipped to meet the academic needs of their students. Private informal education is now growing into a more concentrated industry, for instance with ‘Grinds 360’ company. They offer a wide range of celebrity tutors and teachers, providing hours’ worth of weekly lessons on top of your typical school week, their pricing only slightly more reasonable than ‘The Institute of Education’, who prides itself on its “prestige”, with fees to match it.

Grinds 360’s active partnerships with schools demonstrate that a drive to blur the line between private and public education is also taking place, which isn’t too distinct from other public services that are slowly but surely wound down through underfunding, government mismanagement and contract or agency work. Education is no different. It is ultimately the students who are the victims here, especially those from working class backgrounds, as they are expected to pay rates of at least €1000 for their more minor offers to access all offered subjects, with at least another separate instalment of €399 for books.

Aside from academic pressures being applied to students, this double punishment of economic pressure is applied to their families. Students from working class families face a financial barrier to academic success, where the key to educational achievements is not study or merit, but the financial resources of your family. All the while an industry that is now worth €60 million continues to grow, Ireland reports among the worst of European countries for academic stress.

These are among the many norms now in education in the 26 counties, which still operate under a gender-divided and non-secular regime of education. In this, a culture of how education should operate is developed that reinforces a very regressive trend in education. We can all recall the classroom effect and how the decisions of others may even have influenced ourselves at a very influential age. It’s on this basis that this industry has not only thrived but has even adopted the same marketing tactics of “hustle-culture,” preying on the stress and uncertainty that does not just come from the Leaving Cert, but also more generally in that period of our personal development. The end product is that young people are unnecessarily burdened with extra work, have their free-time robbed from them and further economic burdens are placed on lower income families.

Education has been shown to be in no way a priority for the bourgeois state, as even third level tuition fees are set to floor at around €2500 for September. The government has no set idea as to what they want education in Ireland to be or what experience young people should expect for second level.

A prime example of the class nature of education is the Leaving Cert economics course. The course focuses exclusively on the market as the basis of the capitalist economy, rather than the real driving force of all economic activity, labour. This narrow view glosses over the exploitative relation between labour and capital in our society and is the common view of so called “neoclassical economics”. Through this lens, attacks made on the working class by capitalists such as wage reductions or large scale lay-offs, are seen as merely the products of a fluctuating market, instead of fundamental characteristics of the whole economic system.

By making public education redundant through their own mismanagement, they are able to repeat the neo-liberal mantra of public sectors being inherently inefficient and the private sector being most efficient. A kind of weaponised incompetency of the liberal state that allows the ruling class to consolidate their power and smugly brush off any notion of socialist economic planning or even a stronger public sector.

It’s for this reason that the various bourgeois approaches, of the never-ending waltz between the public and private sector with an audience of only the most desperate of our society, can never work. Any power conceded to capitalists will be the loss of future generations, if not in our present. The moment we find ourselves in is underscored by rapidly increasing encroachment of capitalist influence and privatisation of the education sector. This must be struggled against with as much energy as possible by the youth and working class. Education is a birthright to all human beings and should therefore not be commodified.

Education in Ireland has never truly been free. Extra support for struggling students should of course be provided, but grinds should never be an integral part of all second-level education. Our work as young communists must be in line with developing our vision for an alternative education, one which accounts for the real needs of the youth, which encourages a genuine curiosity in the sciences, prepares us to contribute to the development of society in the most effective way and which is free from the constant threats of poverty faced by so many young people today. We struggle for another type of education system, which is free from the pay-to-win system cultivated by the capitalist system.