Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

First and foremost I do value guidance counsellors. They have not been abolished. Against the background of the necessity to reduce expenditure across all heads of Departments I had a very stark option to meet the targets. One was to disimprove the pupil-teacher ratio across the entire post-primary sector, which would have had knock-on effects in terms of subject choice, and the other was to mainstream the guidance counsellors. I took the second option for reasons which were very compelling. I see that engaging the entire school in the process counteracts to a certain extent the impact guidance counsellors had in the past. Does it displace them? No it does not; it tries to rebalance the provision of this service in very difficult times against the overall reality.

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