Mr. John Boyle:

There have been many wide-ranging questions. Deputy Ó Cuív had a considerable number. With regard to transport, I have first-hand experience of the effect of that change from ten pupils down to eight in the west Wicklow area on the far side of the Blessington lakes. It has created huge difficulties for some of the national schools there. It appeared that families were going to be divided, in that the older children would continue to attend the school they had been attending from the outset and that younger children would have to go to a different school. I had representations on that issue only last year.

I was very interested in the comments on the "roofs overhead" policy, as the Department of Education and Skills officials in Tullamore would have described it over the last decade, in which they very much prioritised demographic factors. It was very difficult to argue with. A child starting school surely deserves to have a place in school, no matter where that child is living. However, there was a consequence of that policy. My colleagues in the ASTI have mentioned it as well. A number of schools were left behind. There was queue-jumping in that new communities very often availed of a new school in double-quick time, while communities that had schools in a state of disrepair had to wait. The numbers there have decreased dramatically, let us be honest about it. When I first got involved in the INTO executive and we went to Tullamore, we would have a list as long as our arms. That list has become shorter.

The priorities for schools in the primary sector were not so much about the renovation of the schools, because there were numerous schemes until the summer works were curtailed and the devolved scheme was very useful for rural schools. There were schemes to deal with the issue of the state of disrepair of schools. The reason the traditional long-established schools were lagging behind was that they were not being provided with the other facilities outside of the mainstream classroom. Children with special educational needs were going out into the rain to pre-fabricated buildings with no toilets and very poor heating, lighting and so on. Principal teachers did not have offices because they were given over to a resource teacher. The big problem, in a country that has done so well for decades in the sporting field, was that the vast majority of these schools had no PE halls. There was no strategy in the last ten or 15 years to provide any previously-established school with a PE hall. That has been a big priority for this organisation over a long time.

It is a very high priority for INTO to have the cuts to the pupil-teacher ratio reversed. We have had numerous motions at our annual congress. We actually have a target beyond even the previous pupil-teacher ratio. Our priority reflects the promises that were made by the Government back in 2001 and 2002, which was that every child in an infant classroom in this country would be in a class of less than 20 pupils, be it rural or urban. There were other promises made around that time as well about numbers dropping down to world-class pupil-teacher ratios at primary level. We are lagging very far behind those.

We welcomed the change to the one-teacher school situation announced in the budget. However, Ms Deirdre O'Connor gave a very stark analysis of an example of what happened to a four-teacher school. It used to have 84 children and four teachers. The number of pupils increased and the number of teachers was decreased to three. We now have 28 children in those classes. That is actually a 33% increase. Where I work, our class sizes in south Dublin actually reduced from 28 to 27 and in some cases to 26. In some rural schools, there is a multi-class situation of three teachers and 28 pupils per class. It is unacceptable and is a big issue for our union and members.

We concur with Deputy Ó Cuív's aspiration of having 1 Gbps broadband in schools. The policy of the Department of Education and Skills in recent years has been to provide 100 Mbps to post-primary schools. We would love to have that for starters. If we got 1 Gbps after that, it could be built on. We have situations in some of our larger schools, which are much larger than some secondary schools, in which iPads cannot be used because the facility to run them is not there. There is basically just enough power to run the white board and maybe a desktop computer or laptop. Obviously, the children in Ireland will lose out badly, especially in rural areas. In a multi-class situation, if a teacher had the facility to use iPads or other such platforms to engage one group of children in group work while delivering another curriculum to another group, the quality of learning for that period would be enhanced dramatically. We would like 100 Mbps to begin with and hopefully 1 Gb after that. Ms O'Connor will cover-----