In 2020, necessity forced Ireland’s education system to change overnight. Within days, schools and universities shifted online in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was not perfect and at times it was chaotic, but the education sector found a way to make it work.

Now we face a different kind of pressure, characterised by rising energy costs and infrastructure constraints..

Across the education sector, there is a striking silence about what will happen in the autumn. Instead of planning now for what might happen if rising energy prices mean schools and universities won’t be able to turn the heating on, we continue as if September will arrive unchanged. And yet, just a few days ago, the Public Accounts Committee heard a gas company had sought to disconnect a school that owes thousands of euro in arrears.

Recent weeks provided a live demonstration of what a national fuel crisis would look like. Blockades at Whitegate, Foynes and Galway docks shut down half the country’s fuel supply. Over 600 filling stations ran dry, while Bus Éireann school transport was suspended. Some Leaving Certificate practicals were postponed. If the argument for energy-resilient education planning ever needed a case study, it just parked a tractor on O’Connell Street.

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It would be easy, at this point, to suggest a return to fully online learning. We have the infrastructure and the precedent. We also know that the potential savings are significant for many educational bodies – but this would be the wrong conclusion. If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that while education can be delivered online, it is not always best that way. Where we saw online delivery during Covid, we found that engagement declined and the interaction with students narrowed. For many of these students, particularly those who were at critical developmental stages, the time lost in the classroom has yet to be made up.

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But we need to redesign education in recognition of the fact that not all types of learning require the same physical presence.

Primary education must, I believe, remain fully in-person. Schools at this level are spaces of care, socialisation and foundational development. Any move away from physical presence would – as it was during Covid – be both educationally and socially regressive. Secondary education presents perhaps more flexibility. Senior cycle students are already engaged in forms of learning that could, in part, be delivered through structured hybrid models. Here we could reduce energy demand while preserving the core educational experience.

It is at third level, however, that the greatest opportunity, and the greatest contradiction, lies. We are currently asking thousands of students to travel long distances daily, often from counties far removed from their institution, because accommodation is unavailable, unaffordable or both. In some cases, students are commuting several hours each day to attend lectures that could be delivered remotely.

Transport systems absorb the cost financially and environmentally of this movement. Students absorb it too, through time lost, fatigue and reduced capacity to engage meaningfully in their studies. Meanwhile, institutions continue to heat large buildings to facilitate teaching models that do not always require physical presence.

Large lecture-based modules, particularly in business, law and the social sciences, are often characterised by passive delivery to hundreds of students. These are precisely the settings where physical presence adds the least pedagogical value relative to its cost.

This is not an argument against campus life – universities should remain places of interaction, debate and intellectual community. But not every hour of learning needs to occur inside their walls. A more considered model would combine asynchronous online content with targeted in-person engagement such as seminars, workshops and applied problem-solving. Timetables could be compressed. Sections of campuses could be zoned and closed during lower-demand periods. Seasonal adjustments could see greater online delivery during peak energy months. None of this requires a technological breakthrough but it does require planning.

Yet planning is precisely what is missing.

There is, understandably, a reluctance to revisit the language of “online learning”. For many, it is associated with isolation and a diminished student experience. But this is about building resilience so that we don’t have to return to emergency measures.

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It is also about recognising timing. Over the next eight to 12 weeks, third-level institutions across Ireland will begin finalising workload models, timetables and delivery structures for the coming academic year. Declining postgraduate numbers have compounded the financial strain felt by these institutions. Enrolments in taught Masters programmes fell by nearly 5 per cent in Irish institutions in 2022/23, with further declines anticipated for the coming academic year. When you also consider Ulster University announcing 450 redundancies, driven partly by millions in lost international student revenue, alongside more than a hundred UK universities cutting staff, the room for error is vanishing. That’s why we need energy-resilient planning, and it must begin now.

The question is not whether the lights will stay on. It is whether we have the foresight to redesign the system before the cost of maintaining it becomes too high for institutions, for our students and for society as a whole.

Paul Davis is an associate professor at Dublin City University

© The Irish Times