Mr. Seamus Mulconry:

I have two brief points and then I would like to hand over to my colleague for a further point. First, on the issue of resources, it is true that the overall budget for education is €8 billion but schools are expected to pay for insurance, heating, lighting, cleaning and so on on 92 cent per pupil per school day. I am always conscious, when I stop off and get a cup of coffee and a bun and spend €5 on it, that I have just blown the budget for a week for a school student. We need to be conscious of that. I would therefore strongly resent taking money from front-line resources and putting it into another layer of administration.

Second, I have a concern around the advocacy. The real strategic challenge facing the primary school sector is that the pace of change has contributed to a major administrative burden which is now unsustainable for teaching principals. In 1984, a person starting had a roll book and a receipt book. That was the level of administration. There is now a huge amount more than that. It has increased exponentially. It is not just that, however. There has been a period of almost unprecedented change in the Irish education system. A huge raft of legislation and of changing demographics is creating a situation which principals are starting to look at and say they cannot take any more. The reason we have a very good primary school system is the quality and calibre of the people who work in and lead our schools and the commitment of boards of management, members of which have to be arm wrestled onto them. It is their commitment. If we overburden them, we risk breaking the system. We have a plethora of advocates, who have loads of things they would like the primary school system to do. We would benefit greatly from a period of masterful inactivity, which would allow schools to absorb all of the changes and focus on what is most important, that is, teaching.