Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On the issue of school buildings, the witnesses might confirm if they believe the previous Government's policy was that school building priority was based on demographics? If a school had a burst in demographics in terms of a major increase in enrolments it would be included in the building programme, but if it did not have such a change in demographics, even if the school was falling apart and the roof was leaking, it would be down the list in terms of building priority. Have the witnesses information on the remaining number of poor standard schools in rural areas that are not moving up the school building list because the criteria does not have any objective measure? For example, if a school comes under a category of being a substandard building, which I believe is category B2, how much is that holding back the necessary provision of school buildings? It would probably be fair to say that the devolved scheme, particularly for primary schools, did much to clean up the building issue even though there was a local input. I am all for local input as I live in rural community. I find most rural people simply want to get the job done. They do not care how we get it done and they are more than willing to take on the responsibility.

The Department has moved away from the traditional transport model of catchment areas and is now very driven by a simple mathematical measurement of where a student's nearest school is located, irrespective of whether it is located in the parish, there has been a traditional pattern in terms of students from an area attending it or whether a bus passes it. How much is that factor affecting primary schools, in particular, but also secondary schools? We find that families from an area who traditionally attended a particular school are now been told that, in terms of mathematical measurement, their children are living nearer to another school and that their part of a parish or area has to change what was a traditional pattern. How much is that affecting schools?

How much is the transport requirement to have ten rather than eight pupils causing the cessation of routes with respect to primary schools in rural areas? The criterion for the setting up of a bus route was the need to have eight pupils but now the requirement is ten pupils. Has that caused a major disruption with many schools, particularly in the more rural of rural areas, having very little school transport?

I apologise for not been here for the start of the meeting as I had to be elsewhere. How high is it on the agenda of the INTO that the cuts in the pupil-teacher ratio in small two-, three- and four-teacher primary schools in rural areas would be fully reversed and that they would revert to what they were previously?

In terms of teacher-principals, one of the witness seemed to indicate that if a school has an enrolment over a certain figure, it will get that a principal post, but if it is under that figure, a uniform policy will be applied rather than a sliding scale. Have proposals to have a sliding scale been put forward and if they have, could we get a copy of them? In other words, if a school has an enrolment of 183, which was the magic figure that was mentioned, that school would get a principal post, but if a school has an enrolment of 170, the teacher-principal would get to be a principal for four days a week, if a school has an enrolment of 110, the teacher in that post would get so much in respect of the principal role, and if one was in that role in a 20-teacher school that teacher might be a fully occupied teacher in that the administrative burden would be small.

Would the witnesses agree that rural Ireland does not have access to broadband either at home or in the schools and that what we need is not a very poor 100 Mbps but 1 Gbps, or fibre connectivity? If Dublin wants to live with 100 Mbps of broadband, that is fine. The demand from myself and other people living in rural Ireland is to have 1 Gbps, to have fibre connectivity to houses. In the village in which I live in a remote part of rural Ireland, we will have fibre connectivity to the school and to 100 houses in the community. It can be easily done, the buoys are already up and we will have that connectivity at the end of January. The idea that we cannot aspire to having 1 Gbps, or in other words fibre, is wrong. I would welcome if all the schools demanded that we move into 21st century and have 1 Gbps.

I was examining school outcomes as apart of a project I did last year, and it is hard to get statistics on them. I used a simple test, namely, out of every 100 pupils how many got to third level education through the system? The findings seemed to indicate that students in many rural areas, including in remote areas, where there would be a socio-economic mix among the parents, were performing at the top of the scale in line with urban advantage schools. I refer to Belmullet and other places like that. In terms of rural education outcomes, if we compare them to the parents' educational levels, they surpassed the equivalents of the cities. Having examined the statistics, if I compare urban blackspots, DEIS urban schools where 20% to 25% of students might get to third level, I do not know a rural second level school where that percentage would be acceptable or where the parents would accept that.

How much data do the witnesses have on young people's outcomes compared with the socioeconomic backgrounds of their parents? If I am right in what I conclude, rural Ireland has been a huge resource of well-educated, well-rounded young people who have come into the production economy. In other words, many of them get high-end jobs and are part of the tiger economy. We always talk about our highly educated, motivated young people. Whereas they see the jobs tend to be located in urban areas - in other words, they migrate out - the statistics on third level access would seem to show that a disproportionate number of these people come from rural areas. I will give a simple example by way of comparison. A higher percentage of children growing up in west Cork, specifically the rural area of west Cork, will go on to third level than the average for the whole of the city of Dublin because the high levels of progression to third level in the affluent area of south County Dublin is more than dragged down by the very low levels in the more socioeconomically deprived areas around the rim of the city. If I am correct, rural Ireland has been a fantastic resource, between schools and community, that has kept the economy going. Therefore, if it were to decline and die, one would lose - if I might put it in crude terms - a fantastic raw material that has driven the economy for the past 20 years. One would certainly reduce the pool considerably because, unfortunately, in parts of urban areas, the number of people who become high-end achievers is relatively small. I am interested in this point.