Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for missing a small part of the beginning of the session. I have two or three different points to make. I will start with adult learners. NALA is making a very strong case. Adult learners have a history of being forgotten and we omit providing for them in the legislation at our peril. If literacy problems are not sorted out early, they will come back to bite us later on as adults and more so as a society. When the legislation passes through the Seanad, we will advocate strongly to the Minister that this needs to be addressed. He is a listening Minister and has a good understanding. However, I am disappointed by the omission of such a provision. Obviously we will do our best in this regard, because it makes no sense to me. I commend NALA for continuing its work; it serves 200,000 people, who are only the ones getting help and not the ones we know nothing about. I do not have a question for the NALA delegation but I would tell it to keep going.

The delegation from the TUI presented us with a fairly serious document, as Deputy Ó Ríordáin noted. Has the TUI met the Minister in respect of the provision of the TUI's vision of free education through local education authorities, which would subsume the role of VECs? This is a major change which is going down the road of adopting the UK model of provision of education through local education authorities. I am concerned about that. I was chair of County Galway VEC at one point. I had never previously worked in the VEC sector. I was a primary school teacher and then worked in a voluntary secondary school and as a lecturer in literacy education at third level. I learned to respect VECs for their diverse provision of education. I would like to see that specialist local provision continue. If the ETBs can take that on in a new way to do even better than the VECs, I would be supportive of that. Could the delegation tell me how they think a local education authority model would be better?

I am very shocked by something I have read here, which needs to be teased out.

It states: "With regard to the treatment of staff of vocational education committees transferring to education and training boards, the TUI is gravely concerned with the diminution and-or elimination of existing contractual and statutory rights and entitlements and considers that the approach of Government in this regard is unwarranted, excessive and unjustified." Can the witness clarify whose contract and statutory rights would be wiped out? How many teachers might this affect? What type of contracts would be affected, and are they currently with the VEC? That is my first question.

Mr. MacGabhann spoke about casualisation. What he described is scary. I feel for the teachers who have only these scraps of jobs, as the witness called them. Does he have a proposal on the minimum number of hours he believes would be legitimate for a teacher to hold? If a teacher is teaching physics and the school only needs that subject taught for four hours that teacher cannot be offered any additional hours. We must be careful about the way we describe jobs and opportunities because if I were a new teacher coming out of college who wanted to get my foot in the door of a school and start building my teaching hours I might be glad to be offered three hours teaching and then four hours. What is Mr. MacGabhann proposing as a minimum to ensure a teacher is not at risk of income poverty and does not consider himself or herself to have a scrap of a job, so to speak? What I am concerned about, ultimately, is the effect of that on the child's education. Does Mr. MacGabhann have any research or qualitative findings that indicate that because my child - I have two children at second level - and everyone else's children are being taught by a number of teachers who teach three or four hours a week, our children are receiving an inferior quality of education and that the standards are lower? If that is the case it is incredible. Has Mr. MacGabhann had a briefing with the Minister on that?