Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

In the first instance, the difference between the voluntary secondary schools and the ETB second-level schools is that the first €330 of teachers' pay is actually paid for by the school. The Minister has given a commitment that if, or when, we return to increasing capitation rates, the first call on any increase in capitation rates would be to enable the schools not to be obliged to fund that €330 themselves. A number of years ago, before the difficult financial circumstances, we actually had offered to pay that directly but the voluntary secondary schools liked the independence of paying some of their teaching staff. That position has changed and they want us to pay it, so we are looking at that. In addition, work was done previously that showed some disparity between the funding of the three sectors, namely, the ETB sector, the voluntary sector and the community schools sector-----