Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is my first opportunity to meet the committee and I look forward to a very positive relationship with it. Our mutual job is to champion education across the general view of the public as well as within the Houses of the Oireachtas. Education has a very strong case to make.

As members are aware, we produced the first action plan for education.

It is an attempt to meet what the Chairman outlined regarding having a clearer focus on outcomes and outputs that are of relevance to the committee and the public but also to introduce the concept of a major central vision, namely to be the best education service in Europe within a decade, built around five key goals with objectives, outcomes and actions under each.

I am convinced education is central to the twin objectives of Government to provide a sustainable path to full employment and to use our economic strength to deliver a fairer society. I have come from the enterprise brief and the key issue for all companies nowadays is access to talent to innovate, to be entrepreneurial, to work in teams and to communicate. That is where our long-term sustainable path to full employment lies and education is at the heart of that. Education is again the only sector where one can genuinely on a permanent basis break down cycles of disadvantage to deliver a fair society. Recently, the chief executive officer of the Peter McVerry Trust addressed my party's think-in and he talked about the challenges of homelessness. The issue he put as No. 1 on the board for a ten-year homelessness strategy was ending school drop-outs. Education is intimately linked to many of the issues central to our concerns.

We have a job to demonstrate to the Oireachtas and the wider public the central importance of what we do. Equally, it is important that the debate on education should not focus exclusively on inputs but should also focus on how children are doing and how well we are progressing. The action plan has a clear focus on how well are children progressing and how well we are succeeding in bringing them out of disadvantage and giving them opportunities; how well schools are preforming in terms of leadership, methodology of teaching, and their capacity to help children with mental health or resilience issues; and how well broader bridges are being built into the community, without which education can never succeed. It is very much an intimate relationship between all the groups, including parents, enterprise, which provides outlets, and the many voluntary, community and public service organisations. Producing a plan of this nature, which we intend to have renewed annually in order that the actions are not only subject to a timeline for this year and we are accountable for them, but that at the end of each year, there will be an opportunity to review with others and to say what is working and what is not and what needs to be changed. That will create a dynamic of reform that will be helpful.

I am fortunate to head up a Department with immense experience, which runs a tight ship in terms of many of the indicators, but even the best run system can have the ambition to do better and that is clearly what we are doing. There are tangible targets, which will be of interest to members such as bringing the retention rates in DEIS schools up to the same level as ordinary schools. That will involve reducing the drop-out rate from approximately 19% to 10%. It would be a significant improvement as we develop this plan.

The Department's budget is €8.1 billion for current expenditure and €600 million for capital expenditure. A huge feature of current expenditure is the 80% devoted to pay. We employ 101,000 whole-time equivalents and we reach more than 1.5 million learners in some dimension or other. We are, therefore, an employment intensive operation and we depend on the quality, drive and leadership of that group.

The committee asked about pressures. There clearly are pressures on our budget, including demand and the need to improve services. Specific pressures this year include the number of retirements, which will cost approximately €50 million, and the need to provide funding for 860 SNAs who took up posts last month. There are always continuing pressures on the capital budget in respect of building and responding to demographic pressures. There has been a substantial increase in the budget for special educational needs over the past 15 years. The total allocation now is €1.5 billion and substantial investment has been made in resource teachers and SNAs and this is designed to focus on the needs of children with special educational needs. The allocation of resources is based on models of assessment as well as general learning allocations and I am happy to discuss that.

Schools investment is the big driver of capital expenditure. There has been a substantial increase in the number of pupils attending both primary and secondary school. This year, the new builds are anticipated to provide 20,000 additional schools at both levels. At any given time, there are 66 major projects under construction and approximately 50 will be completed this year. It is a supply chain moving along all the time with different gateways in the approval process ranging from schools being put on the list to being released to tender and going to construction.

Looking to the future, given the backdrop of €600 million being available across all Departments for discretionary spending in the upcoming budget, the pressure to meet all their needs is difficult. That is true in my area as well. A demographic uplift is built into the no policy change provision of our Estimate and, therefore, €103 million has been set aside to meet the increasing pupils numbers at first and second level but that only refers to PTR and capitation. The Lansdowne Road agreement will add €130 million to our budget, which is provided for.