Mr. Tomás Ó Ruairc:

My colleagues have given an excellent analysis of the situation in respect of the curricular space and the curricular uptick. I want to focus on Deputy Mitchell's question on the weighing of children. Counterintuitively, if not counterproductively, it goes to the heart of the matter. We are responsible for a register of 100,000 teachers across primary, post primary and further education. We have a governing board and a Teaching Council which represents nearly all stakeholders in education. I am pointing those facts out because by default we take a whole-of-system response across education.

We would recoil at a human level from the suggestion that children be weighed in schools. There is a sense that it is a no-no. From a more objective policy response, it would miss the wood for one tree - it would miss the overall issue. Ms McCafferty referred to the risk of other professionals being seen to offload their work onto teachers. If anything, teachers want to connect better with other professionals. They do not want to take on their work and the other professions do not want to offload it either. They want to understand better the perspectives that the other professionals bring to bear in the interests of children and young people. Teachers care - they care deeply about the children and people in their care. They understand also that they have a professional remit in this space that needs to be very carefully watched.

As we said in our opening submission, it is a whole-of-person issue that requires a whole-of-system response. Ms Leydon mentioned in the opening statement the importance of policy consistency given the source of the suggestion in the first place was in England, where there is not a teaching council. Policy consistency has been an interesting issue, to put it mildly. One of the reasons a Teaching Council was established in Ireland was to try to support greater policy consistency so that there is less back and forth and people know where they stand - teachers and students alike. We would be against that suggestion for the reasons I have outlined.