Pat Breen (Clare, Fine Gael)
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Question 199: To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if his attention has been drawn to the concerns regarding the future of a school (details supplied) in County Clare; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [7649/12]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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The new simplified approach to the General Allocation Model of support for schools will make it easier to automatically update it annually in line with the changes in the number of classroom teachers in each school. Schools will also have autonomy on how to deploy the resource between language support and learning support depending on their specific needs. The arrangements for the staffing allocation under the General Allocation Model (GAM) are specifically designed to facilitate GAM hours being clustered into full-time posts – either entirely within their own school or with a nearby neighbouring school. The new GAM allocations are being done in 5-hour blocks which is the equivalent of the tuition time for a full school day. Teachers that are in shared posts between schools can therefore operate local arrangements that enable their travel to a neighbouring school to be done, where possible, from the start of the school day thus avoiding loss of tuition time.

Any re-clustering of learning support (GAM) and language support hours into full-time posts will be operated at school level with schools having greater autonomy rather than the previous Department led approach.

However, because of the later timeline for the allocation of resource hours by the NCSE, schools will not be permitted to combine GAM and NCSE approved resource hours together into full-time posts.

My Department will be notifying schools in the coming weeks of the new staffing arrangements for 2012/13 school year.