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

The Chairman should try to ensure my answers are short, as I have a tendency to go on a bit.

To answer Deputy Kitt's question, we do not expect that there will be a gap. Some teacher unions have complained about the number who are qualifying as teachers or applying to undertake a transfer degree course. For example, someone with an arts degree can apply to take the conversion course to become a qualified and recognised primary school teacher. It is one profession which is in short supply worldwide. Irish people are particularly well suited, for example, to teaching in the United Kingdom and the south of England has a massive crisis in the provision of both primary school places and teachers. Sadly, the same situation does not obtain across the rest of United Kingdom, but there is a shortage of teachers. Consequently, we cannot stop people from doing these courses. We can limit the supply in the public sector, but as of now, we do not anticipate, on the basis of what we can foresee, that there will be a crisis in the gap to which the Deputy referred.

In respect of the enrolment numbers and the payment of schools, I have just come from a new school that is opening in Swords, where people were complaining about the problem they had experienced. When the school started, it had 24 pupils, but it now has 224. However, it is being paid a capitation grant based on last year's enrolment figure - just 100 pupils. I am told the reason the system was put in place was that when the primary school system was, in population terms, declining, it was a way of providing some stability within the school system. The White Paper published in the mid-1990s by a previous Minister for Education, Niamh Breathnach, stated the big challenge facing the primary school system was managing decline. It was then thought we would be losing population in schools. At the time, there were just under 500,000 pupils, but we now have 520,000 and rising. There will be 70,000 additional primary and post-primary kids in the system within the next seven or eight years. It is a cash-flow problem for some schools and as we are in straitened economic circumstances, I do not have much room for manoeuvre. However, I recognise this is a major challenge for rapidly growing schools and it will become an even greater challenge.

On the panel system and the diocesan structure, I share the Deputy's view. We would like the Catholic authorities to modernise their system of allocating school teachers and resources and some progress has been made in this regard. The Deputy's family has made a great contribution to the world of education and I am merely telling him things he knows well, but, in effect, we have a public private partnership system of education which, as I stated, dates back to 1831. In a sense, the State undertook to pay the salaries of teachers, set the curriculum and provide for the examination process, while the partner on the private side, namely, the patron, provided the premises, either completely or partially in the form of a site, as well as providing the board of management and for supervision. The patron became the employer that ran the school. That was a 32 county system which, by and large, is still in place and essentially has not changed. We had a primary school examination at the end of sixth class which I think - Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin should help me - was abolished in 1967.