Mr. David Duffy:

I want to return to Deputy O'Sullivan's question for which I thank her. In terms of what we would expect and hope from an order, we would be looking for two things. One relates to the number of whole-time equivalents across the system of caretaking, cleaning and secretarial staff. It would be no harm to look at that also in terms of whole-time equivalent staffing in support agencies such as child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, Tusla and so on. There has been a good deal of research on staffing shortages in that area and despite the best efforts of the staff in those organisations, they are struggling with caseloads they cannot manage. That has a knock-on effect on schools.

In other circumstances, it probably would be a simple enough task to pull staff data off a payroll system. In fairness to my colleagues in the Department of Education and Skills, in this case that simply would not be possible for them because of the diverse ways in which non-teaching staff are employed. As Ms Carton rightly mentioned, because not all of them are paid by the Department, that is not an option. The easiest way to do it is probably by way of a survey akin to what my departmental colleagues did in 2009. The TUI would be more than happy to support our departmental colleagues in any way we can in terms of asking people to get that data back as soon as possible. In any context a survey will be part of the response but we will be happy to do anything we can to make sure the response is as extensive as possible.

As the Deputy and others rightly mentioned, we also need to factor in the increase in student numbers. In the timeframe I outlined we will have an increase in pupil numbers at post-primary level of approximately one third. We are just over half way through that increase now. We had approximately 60,000 extra students in the post-primary system in the past seven years. Over the next six years we are looking at approximately another 40,000. It is a case of doing the survey of whole-time equivalents as to where we are now. We have good baseline data from ten years ago so it is a case of comparing the two but also factoring in that we are now looking at a significantly larger number of students to take into account.

As I mentioned earlier in regard to Senator Gallagher's question, we are not looking just for restoration of the numbers to where we were, and my ETBI colleague also made reference to that. We will look for more in terms of where we were then and where we will be in a few years. A survey is probably the easiest way to gather the data in this particular context because not all the staff we are talking about are directly employed by the Department.