Ms Karen Jordan:

I wish to answer the direct question put to me about the St. Teresa's Gardens regeneration board. The school has never been a part of it, even though we are just at the other end of Donore Avenue. I took over as principal last September and have met the board in the past year. There is a Donore Avenue community centre, which the school must rent to perform concerts at the end of the year, but it is not accessible to us during the school day for PE - for football, running around or any other sports - because it is rented to the Coombe Women's Hospital for its antenatal classes. As I said in both the submission and my opening statement, we are mentioned in the Dublin City Council framework plan but we have never been asked to meet the council.

It has said the land has been put aside for educational use and I have asked for agreement in principle from the Department but I have received nothing. Returning to what Senator Ruane asked about well-being, sports halls etc., we do have a hall in our school. It is a general purpose hall meant for everything. It just about fits the 214 students but it does not fit the 214 students, the teachers and the parents or anybody else. Our class sizes can be detrimental to the roll-out of Aistear or to any new mathematics, oral language or other curriculum.

I believe the average classroom size on the Department's own website is about 80 sq. m. Our biggest is 66 sq. m and our smallest, housing 25 children this morning, is 36 sq. m. It completely falls short. I am finding it very tricky as a principal to ask a teacher to go into an environment like that, plan and teach the children. Parents are also finding it difficult to drop their children into a situation like that. During the summer, the Minister announced a new well-being programme. I do not know how we can roll that out if our building is not safe and healthy for the children and teachers and how we can even be concerned about the general well-being of the population. We like to do hurling and we want to do physical education. We walk over a kilometre outside of the area, from Dublin 8 to Dublin 12, to play hurling. We would like to do the daily mile and we go running up Cork Street and across South Circular Street but we have road safety issues. In 2015 we got two prefabs and they were much smaller because of the space allocated. As that took our only playing pitch, which was a very small tarmacadamed football pitch, the additional accommodation is decreasing the play and running space in an area and an era where well-being and combatting obesity is meant to play a huge role.