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

I thank the three Deputies for their questions. I will ask the Minister of State to come in if he wishes to address some of the issues that have been raised. As a background to this, we are very conscious in the Department that we are asking everybody in the system to do more with less, that there are many pressures and that many families are under pressure. Schools and the education community are no different. In many cases, some second-level teachers are operating in difficult circumstances because of the nature of the contracts they have.

I will turn to the specific queries that were raised by the three Deputies. I will take them in the order in which I received them. In response to Deputy McConalogue's question, we are still operating on the figure of €44 million.

If the full 500 teachers are required to maintain the status quoin special education resource teachers, we calculate that, as of now, it is of the order of €22.5 million. We will not know that for definite until September and it is a rough calculation based on the average cost of a teacher multiplied by 500. We had provisionally put into the 2014 figures revenue of approximately €6 million, coming from a saving on grants due to the asset tests. That has not been finalised or completed yet and I do not expect we will make much progress on it for this year. That is a problem.

On examining the reserves for the Vocational Education Committees, VECs, Education and Training Boards, ETBs and the institutes of technology, we were always aware that some of those institutions might be more stressed than others and less robust in their funding than others. There will be discussions with all of them individually on how we will proceed. Letterkenny Institute of Technology has a particular, once-off difficulty with which the Deputy is probably familiar, having spoken to those in the institute. The impact of the Haddington Road agreement is a very good point and we will make it. We have not yet had the detailed discussions. We are being credited with €51 million for 2013 but no figure has been agreed for 2014 or 2015. That is a work in progress and any support the committee can give us would be very helpful.

I was interested to hear what Deputy McConalogue said about the Catholic Primary School Managers' Association, CPSMA, deputation that appeared before the committee. I was not aware of that precise figure of 60% in the red. We will certainly examine it. If there are proceedings from the committee it would be useful for us to get them. I was not directly aware of it. I have made the case with the Taoiseach and others to try to get some degree of ring-fencing for education. We are the only part of the public service that is continuing to recruit additional people because of the demographics. That is not the case in other areas, although there has been some slight reduction as a result of yesterday's Cabinet announcement. I will continue to make the case. On small schools and the implementation of the third year of the alteration in the pupil-teacher ratio, I will not change it. It will proceed. There is much internal money in the smaller school sector in some respects and everybody must contribute to the savings.

Deputy Ó Ríordáin raised three specific issues. The special education allocation of €1.3 billion is just €100 million less than what we put into third-level education in its entirety. That is why I have asked Mr. Eamon Stack, the chairperson of the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, to head up the special working group which will report to me at the end of September this year, regarding getting a different allocation model for resource teachers, SNAs and resources to schools. Those who know how it would function tell me it will take at least two financial years before I will have an operational model. It is proposed to profile the school and make the resources available to that school as opposed to an individual's diagnosis unlocking access to resources. That would be controversial.