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

Deputy McConalogue also raised the question of career guidance and the mainstreaming effect it has had. The youth crisis in our society that has resulted in tragedies like suicide contains some elements related to the school environment and others from outside our schools. I refer the Deputy to a substantial survey carried out by the National Council for Guidance in Education, the director of which is Jennifer McKenzie. The conclusions of that survey are less dramatic than the one undertaken by the Institute of Guidance Counsellors. We have published two reports, one with the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, on mental health and well-being in the school environment and the other on the action plan on bullying.

Controversy has arisen over the statement by the Minister of State, which I support, on reinforcing a whole school engagement in the welfare and guidance of young people. Counselling and career guidance are two separate issues and when I speak about guidance counsellors I am referring to the pastoral care dimension. If this is everybody's concern, it is also everybody's responsibility. The health document that the Minister of State produced with major input from a number of specialists in this area states that a young person who is troubled should in the first instance be able to talk to an adult with whom he or she feels comfortable, whoever that adult may be. It may be the English teacher, the sports coach or the caretaker. Given the way in which the approach is being driven in the policy document, that adult will already have been sensitised in a school briefing which advises all adults working in the school to keep their eyes and ears open for signs of distress. The first responsibility of whoever this young person approaches is to refer him or her to the guidance counsellor and, in turn, if the counsellor believes the issues arising are much bigger than he or she is professionally equipped to address, the young person will be referred onwards. It is a three-stage approach. By mainstreaming the issue, responsibility for the well-being of students is placed on the entire community, including the mates of the young person in question, as distinct from the old perception that it was exclusively the responsibility of guidance counsellors.

I acknowledge that we have made a reduction in the allocation of resources. I am not dressing the issue up as anything other than a reduction of resources. In the first instance we have given responsibility and choice to the school principal to deploy the reduced allocation as best he or she can. Some principals have welcomed that change, whereas others have been silent and, of course, the guidance counsellors are unhappy about it. I do not think we can come to a conclusion as to whether our decision has reduced safety for young people in our schools but it was informed by the principle of reducing the impact on front-line services. The alternative was to reduce pupil-teacher ratios across the post-primary school sector.

The Deputy also asked whether the proportions of special needs assistants and resource teachers are decreasing in the context of population growth. The population is growing at a faster rate than the incidence of requirements for SNAs and resource teachers.

There will be a minor reduction in resources of 5%, from 60 to 52 minutes or thereabouts. A new NCSE board has been appointed and new research work is being done. I suggest the committee invite the NCSE to appear before it to discuss new findings. The allocation of resources, special teachers and so on is based on survey analysis and conclusions that are more than 12 years old and a great deal of work has been done in this area, both nationally and internationally, which should be brought to bear on how best to deploy the resources we have available. I will not increase the number of SNAs based on an old model of needs assessment. We are in the process of updating it. I have not done too badly, relatively speaking, to ring-fence the numbers. In the draft Croke Park II agreement a proposal is on the table, should it be accepted, for a redeployment mechanism for SNAs but not in the same way as the redeployment of teachers. If a new SNA is to be allocated to another client in another school, the first call will be on an SNA whose client has graduated or moved on. That will create employment continuity. The details have to be worked out, but that will consolidate the role SNAs have as individuals as distinct from a cohort of people.

I refer to Deputy Jonathan O'Brien's questions and the different ways of delivering education. Yesterday the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and I were in a post-primary school - Presentation College, Warrenmount - in Dublin's inner city. It is approximately a 20 minute walk from here. Four young fifth year students were doing trigonometry from the honours mathematics syllabus by video link with a class in Coláiste Bríde in Clondalkin, a sister school in the Presentation order. They are unable to do honours mathematics in their school because it is not offered, but they are able to take the subject with the same teacher as the class in Clondalkin. There was a media scrum yesterday because broadband was being rolled out, but I am sure the Deputy could find examples of this in his area. It is the way to go. We can now ensure languages, higher level maths and science courses can be taken by those who want to do them. In the past we could not, for example, make science compulsory because every post-primary school did not have a science laboratory. The resources of the schools got in the way of the Department wanting to make it desirable for a subject to become mandatory. We can make that decision by providing the communications technology to enable students to take the course and, for example, without having to provide a new laboratory in a school, which is a significant capital cost. County Meath VEC has for the past year delivered chemistry classes from Longwood to other schools in its catchment area. They can do the close-up stuff for experiments and so on. When one considers the Open University has been doing this for years, it is possible; therefore, we are examining different ways of delivering education.

On the question of new teachers, we have consistently asked the INTO, because the problem arises primarily at primary level, not to rehire retired teachers on a short-term basis. It is union policy, but the principals who rehire, perhaps, the former principal are all union members and, therefore, we sent a circular 31/2011 in May 2011 following the first teachers' conference I attended to focus on this issue. It is an issue and we do not hire the teachers directly. It is a matter both for the teachers' unions and young teachers, in particular, to enforce their own instruction in this regard.

The Deputy also asked about school uniforms, which brings us back to the issue we discussed when Deputy Áodhan Ó Ríordáin was present - the relationship within the schools between the Department and the providers. We have, in effect, a public private partnership and the private part of it relates to the ethos of the schools and decisions on uniforms, codes of discipline and a host of other issues. What is possible is an initiative from the National Parents Council - Primary to mobilise parent representatives on all boards of management to ask for a generic uniform, whereby parents could go to any retail outlet. In my experience it can cost between €50 and €70 for a jumper when a similar jumper could be bought for €25 and €30 with the school only needing to add the emblem. We are trying to get this to a point where all the large retailers will stock generic uniforms and schools can differentiate because they can do it. The Finns probably wonder why we have school uniforms, but that is for another day. There are arguments for and against uniforms in this culture and the Department will not take a policy position on it. That is part and parcel of the public private partnership. This is correctly an issue that should be decided by a school community. Unlike in Finland, the United Kingdom and other countries where, if one lives a certain area, one can only attend the public school in that area, we have choice in this country. The solution to the problem of the cost of the uniform is to have a generic garment and a dedicated badge and I would like the issue to be addressed.