Ms Joanne Irwin:

On the pay talks first, there is a meeting to be held on Friday of this week. The concern of teachers is that those pay talks will look at the length of the salary scales across the public sector because of all of the public sector had two additional points added to their scale. We are hopeful, but do not know, that it will deal with the fact that teachers were disproportionately hit in that they lost the HDip allowance.

We do not know if this will be part of the talks. The new teachers lost incremental recognition for pre-service training. Will this be part of the talks? Although the talks are welcome, we do not know if they will address the full list. We hope they will because the three teachers' unions have a joint motion on this and we have action to take if the talks do not address the three issues.

On the evidence of teacher supply and other subject areas, our Principals and Deputy Principals Association, PDA, conducted a study of all our schools in February and March. They found that they cannot get teachers in the areas of biology, French and material technology - wood. This is as well as the Irish, home economics and maths areas, which we spoke of earlier.

With regard to the steering group, we welcome any initiative that will improve the crisis in the teaching profession. We also note, however, that there is no teacher representative on the group. There is also no representative from management bodies on the group. There are no plans that we are aware of to converse with us on that issue. For years we have said there will be a teacher supply crisis. The steering group has been established now but it is important that there is some sort of mechanism for the steering group to liaise with the management bodies and the teachers' unions to address some of the issues we have discussed today.