Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister does not get the issue of school transport at all. There are hundreds of children who cannot get a seat on the bus. I am not talking about concessionary children, although it is abysmal to categorise children in that way. Many of those the Minister refers to as concessionary are the children of our front-line workers who cannot get to work because their children do not have a seat on the bus. What would the Minister say to the mother of four children who has contacted me? Her children are 15, 13, ten and eight years old. She missed the deadline by two days because she was having surgery. She has no transport and it is a distance of 20 miles to the school. How are those children going to get to school? The Minister does not get the urgency of the situation. Everybody has raised this subject today. Will the Minister talk to Bus Éireann and get it to act as a matter of urgency? People are being pushed from Billy to Jack. Bus Éireann's reply to this mother indicated that payments to it cannot be processed at the moment because it is unsure if there is any spare capacity and that it will have a further look at the matter in a few weeks. For heaven's sake, these children have been off school for months already. It is just not good enough.

I welcome the Minister's comment to the effect that the system used for calculated grades will give primacy to the teachers' grades rather than to the algorithms or to any other process such as those used in the other four jurisdictions. It would have been reckless to do anything else. The Minister has said, however, that the appeals process will not examine the accuracy of the teachers' or schools' judgment in awarding grades but will simply check the accuracy of the data. We do not know what the data are. I will ask the Minister a very specific question. Why will she not tell us what data are being used? Why will she not tell us what model is being used? I ask her to please not speak around the model but to tell us why.

What provision has been made for students who sat the leaving certificate examinations last year? We are five days away from the results being released. Some 20,000 students are affected by this and they need to know.

What contact has the Minister had with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection regarding the eligibility for unemployment payments of those who choose to sit their leaving certificate examinations this November and have to go to college?

What does the Minister have to say to the approximately 10,200 students who will receive a grade that does not reflect their hard work and ability? They will now have fewer points when seeking places that may demand increased points. As a mother of somebody who is doing his leaving certificate this year, I want to know whether he will be one of the 10,200. Will we have to wait until Monday to find out?

I have spoken about the issues of transport eligibility and the appeals process. I also want to ask the Minister about the ancillary grant. She has talked about the money being given to schools but I know of schools whose €5,000 ancillary grant has been taken away because of the arbitration agreement in 2015 which covered the period from 2016 to 2019. Will the Minister tell me whether this grant will be restored? Will she tell the school how it can pay a secretary and a cleaner out of €10,000 per year?

The supply panels for substitute teachers are not working in many rural areas. They are not enough and must be expanded. Ballina is the nearest panel to the area of Erris, in which I live. This distance of 50 miles is far too great to be workable. I ask the Minister to answer those questions and thank her.