Dr. Seán Rowland:

I invite everyone to come and see the live streaming of our online auxiliary teaching services. Parents, teachers and lecturers need to see there is some value in it rather than writing it off. We were written off 20 years ago. All I ask is that committee members are open minded and take a look at how online services can help students. I totally agree that by no means should these services ever replace a teacher. It requires very disciplined approaches and it will not suit all children, all schools or all teachers. I invite committee members to come and see how it works because it works very successfully in some cases. It may alleviate our short-term problems and let us focus on dealing with the long-term problem, which is that today, every constituency has students with unqualified people in front of them in the classroom. We must ask committee members to help us because we cannot do it on our own. It will take time and energy, and the support of the committee, to get programmes that will create more teachers.

Bringing back teachers is an answer we can all help with. We need to qualify them, because many of them will not be qualified to tick all of the boxes for the Teaching Council, but this is very doable. Hibernia College is actively working on putting in place a programme. Five years ago I opened a college in London which focused on subject knowledge enhancement for teachers. It meant an extra subject for a teacher who was already registered with the Teaching Council and already teaching in, for example, Glenamaddy and needed another subject.

The mathematics programme introduced here and completed in Limerick is a successful model. The Irish programme is also a model. My colleagues here are from many institutions that can deliver for the State. We can get these teachers educated. It will be a matter of money and we all have to face this big elephant in the room. Everything costs, and this is a time when we have trolleys in hospitals and there are shares of the pie, but the committee is in a very strong position to state it is the Government's job to provide qualified teachers for each of our primary and post-primary students so let us start there and get this sorted.

I am old enough to remember when that happened before. At the time, the education committee, the Government and the Department ended up putting their shoulders to the wheel and getting everyone qualified. We went through a grace period and then we went through a period when we thought there were too many teachers and that Hibernia College was flooding the market with teachers. As far back as when Ruairí Quinn was the Minister, we were warning there would be a shortage of teachers. It is definitely cyclical. I ask the committee to focus on the now to get the short term sorted, with a view to putting systems in place for the long term.