Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

The bulk of the allowances are paid effectively for promotions where we do not have a promotional structure and we pay allowances for promotions and for qualifications which effectively have become part of basic pay for new entrants. We talked about the supervision and substitution allowance. Apart from that, we would not say we are any different from any other sector in terms of the variation in the small allowances we have. The reason the spotlight is on the educational allowances is that those four big groups of allowances make up such a big proportion of teacher pay. It is done like this in many countries. The reason we have additional allowances for responsibility for positions of deputy principal, principal and so on, relate back to the nature of teaching, the long incremental scale and the fact that teachers can take up responsibilities at different stages in their carers. Traditionally it was considered that this was better. That has remained the case. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is now examining this. The most effective way to do that was to give people allowances rather than create a separate salary scale for principal or deputy principal because that would mean that after only five years a teacher might move up to a principal post whereas another teacher might only do so after 25 years, and there are differences.