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

It would not apply to the next academic year. It would be the year after, because there would be issues such as implementation and getting the information. That is assuming we reach a decision fairly quickly.

The issue of fee-paying schools was the other one mentioned by most members. Last year, we raised the pupil-teacher ratio for fee-paying schools - 55 of them - from 21:1 to 23:1. There was some concern about where all of this is going, what was my agenda, if I had an agenda, and how far we would go. As the committee will be aware, an bord snip nua, Colm McCarthy's body, had recommended that it be increased as far as 28:1.

We had very little information. The schools themselves published a conclusion from a PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, report which stated that having fee-paying schools was to the State's advantage because it costs the State less to have a student in a fee-paying school, but they have never published the full report. We undertook to do an analysis, not an audit, of fee-paying schools. The methodology used was to ascertain the fee being charged by each of the schools, which is in the public domain, and to do a simple multiplication based on the school numbers, which we knew. Mr. Martin Hanevy, an assistant secretary in Athlone, was driving the project. The Department contacted all of the schools stating the Department's calculation of their gross income and asking them to confirm such was the case and whether it was their effective income. They responded in various ways, most of them looking for a confidentiality clause, into which we entered. We were then told that they have a certain number of students who are being carried on reduced fees - in some cases, the families are not paying the fees because they are no longer in a position to pay them - or they have obligations with regard to mortgages on school buildings and other ancillary costs. Therefore, we got a net figure. All of this is in the report that was published yesterday. Deputy O'Brien probably has not had a chance to go through it.

In order to respect the request for anonymity from the schools and also to make no distinction between Catholic, Protestant and other denominations, we grouped them under two categories: volume of income, based on the scale of the fee, and size of the school, based on enrolment. There are a number of calculations that come out of that. They are in broad bands - approximately, from memory, five or seven bands and clusters. The total amount of discretionary income available, after their liabilities and obligations were discharged, for the 55 schools was €81.6 million, but that ranges from a couple of thousand euro in some cases to a significant amount in others. That is what the report tells us. As to what we will do next, no decision has been made.

Since this process started, Kilkenny College in Kilkenny city has decided to come into the free voluntary system. The committee can speak to the school as it wishes, but one of the factors that influenced the school was that, like a number of provincial schools, it had boarders, day-boarders and day students. Wilson's Hospital School in Multyfarnham was the first to construct an arrangement whereby its boarders were separately accounted for. It is a Protestant school, and Protestant families who qualify for income support - which was put in place when the free voluntary scheme was brought into existence in 1966-1967 - could be subsidised there. The day-boarders are students who travel a fair distance and who, when they arrive in the morning, might get a top-up breakfast and who certainly get lunch, tea and supervised study. Rockwell College and others run similar schemes. The components outside the classroom that are covered by the current free scheme can be charged by the school. In addition to the accounts for the residential pupils, there was what I will call a day-boarding account, where there was a fee for all-in provision of services outside the classroom. At Wilson's Hospital, the classroom subjects themselves and the teacher allocation come under the umbrella of a free voluntary school. That model - there is a transitional arrangement within it that has been constructed by the school section in Athlone - was developed in consultation with Wilson's Hospital over a couple of years. It is that model that Kilkenny College examined and decided made sense for it. It made sense for two reasons. First and foremost, from a resource point of view, the capitation that the school would get and the pupil-teacher ratio that it would get, as distinct from what it got under the fee-paying scheme, were more attractive. From the point of view of ethos, it made a great deal of sense. Anecdotally, I encountered this at a function at Alexandra College in south Dublin, which is a Church of Ireland girls' school, where a number of parents from Kilkenny said to me that many of the Protestant families in the area - I refer to rural south Leinster and north Munster - simply could not afford the fees of Kilkenny College but wanted, for all the reasons to which any person is entitled, to have their children educated in a school of their ethos. That was a factor in the decision by Kilkenny College.

I should say that there are approximately four other schools, both Catholic and Protestant - not all of which are boarding schools - now talking to the Department. I cannot tell the committee their names they are because they have sought confidentiality. In 1966, a couple of Catholic schools chose not to come into the free voluntary system because they had recently been established and had a building programme - in effect, a mortgage - and the free scheme did not accommodate the commitments on that mortgage. There may be other schools that choose to come in. One of my concerns was the perception in Northern Ireland that somehow or other the Government was attacking Protestant schools, and it was seen as discriminatory. It is not discriminatory. That is the position.

On another similar matter, Deputy O'Brien and the Chairman inquired about the possibility of a minor works grant scheme of some kind or other. I am talking to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, about the possibility, if some stimulus funding becomes available in whatever shape or form, of bringing it into the schools programme. There are some choices available to us. First, there is no promise of any funding. There is an expectation that there might be some, but we will not know until later. If it becomes available, there is the question of what will go into the schools physical capital programme of infrastructure. There is the summer minor works grant or, possibly, the continuation or acceleration of the process of getting rid of prefabs. In many cases, we are paying rent for prefabs. The attraction for me - and for the management bodies within schools, particularly the principals - is that in bad weather it is a nightmare moving from a stand-alone prefab into the main framework of a school.

One also has the opportunity of giving a covered link or a full link to the school if the site configuration allows for it. There is no proposal for a minor works or small works scheme at present. We are considering the matter but I cannot give an undertaking on it. That, however, is my own preference at this point in time.

I will now turn to the unanswered questions that Deputy McConalogue put to me. If I miss any perhaps I can come back to answer them if they are brought to my attention. I will be as brief as possible. He raised the view of budgetary problems manifesting themselves in terms of the coming 2014 budget. It is too early to say at this stage. The budget process has been brought back in terms of chronological order, and will now be in October, which requires us to start our preparations that bit earlier. We are dealing with internal logistics. Currently, we are being obliged to find approximately €44 million. If Croke Park II goes through we do not know how much credit will be assigned to that €44 million figure from the central public sector savings spread across all Departments. I am not evading the question but these are early days. We will meet all the additional teachers who come into the system - I have spoken about the need to hire approximately 900 new teachers. There will not be a rerun of the early retirement challenge we encountered last year, which at one stage seemed set to create a major problem. As there is not the kind of deadline we faced last year, we are not anticipating problems at this stage. If it is accepted, Croke Park II contains an equalisation measure which will provide for greater security of tenure for teachers in employment terms but now is not an opportune time to discuss the agreement given that it is now with public servants for their unions to consider in the first instance and to make or not make recommendations. Individual public servants, be they teachers, nurses or whoever else, will then vote on it. When we have a result we will have a clearer indication on the budgetary implications.

The Deputy asked about PLC cuts and their consequences. We saw from Marlborough Street that the pupil-teacher ratio for post-primary schools was lower than that for PLC courses. The figures were 17 and 19, if my memory serves me correctly. We felt that young adults out of the leaving certificate cohort who had chosen to continue education would be easier to teach because they are more motivated than those who are reluctantly staying on for sixth year. In the context of the overriding principle of protecting front-line services as much as possible, we felt we could make that reduction.

Due the autonomy possessed by VECs, we were not able to conduct an impact analysis of the implications ourselves and the VECs are better placed to conduct such an analysis. We looked for 40 whole-time equivalent posts in order to provide the savings required. I have asked the VECs to provide us with an impact analysis of how this will work. Members will have been lobbied, as have I, by various PLC colleges. They tend to be in the large urban areas. For example, the City of Dublin VEC has 48 such posts, whereas County Dublin has hardly any. The old urban centres have PLC colleges or colleges of further education. The changes will not be implemented until next September and we are still waiting for a comprehensive impact analysis by the VECs. In fairness to them, the analysis is complicated by the education and training boards legislation. To take, for example, Deputy O'Brien's area of Cork, the city and the county will now become one unit and there may be potential to save jobs by redeploying people who would otherwise be lost from the system to surrounding post-primary schools which have vacancies. We have asked the incoming CEOs and the existing VECs to give us an impact analysis of what this adjustment will mean in terms of real job losses or, alternatively, courses that cannot be properly delivered and have an employment consequence. When we get that information we will try to respond but we have to achieve the savings. If we do not achieve savings in that area I will have to find them somewhere else in the education sector.