Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will pick up on that last point. I raised the point at a previous meeting that I am not sure the Department is keying into the idea of what the industry would call scope 3 emissions, which are the emissions external to the school. We are focused on solar panels and the energy efficiency of the build stock, and that is entirely appropriate, but we are not looking, particularly in new school builds, at the potential of that scale of investment within a community to be the linchpin of an active travel network. I have seen too many instances of new school builds that are predominantly car dependent in terms of access to the school. That is more of a comment than a question.

I want to take a closer look at the school books scheme. Budget 2023 provided more than €50 million for the free school books scheme at primary level. That is very welcome and it was hugely significant in all sorts of ways, particularly as a cost-of-living measure. I have a nagging concern, however. I worry about the school books mediating the curriculum, for example. When there is a reliance on a school book to dictate the terms of the curriculum, the independence of the teacher and his or her responsibility to mediate the curriculum are undermined. We can say that responsibility still rests with the teacher, and it does, but as a former teacher, I can remember the pressure of sending home workbooks that did not have chapter 6 done, for example. The question is then asked why chapter 6 was not done. It could be that the teacher decided not to cover the topic in question or wanted to do something in a different way. That creates a pressure.

What performance metrics are we applying to this spend? Are we just encouraging schools to go out and buy books that they do not necessarily need? Workbooks are something I am particularly worried about in that kind of scenario, as opposed to textbooks. There is also a concern around the concentration of the benefit of this scheme, either to larger suppliers or the publishers. I am particularly worried about that in the context of moving to secondary school. We must consider this spend and its ability to contribute to a local economy in the round. Otherwise we will have, as we are already having, smaller school book suppliers getting squeezed out of the market, particularly as larger schools look for efficiency in the administration of the free school book scheme. There have already been overtures from book publishers to supply directly to schools and that exacerbates the issues I was talking about of textbooks that are not needed and of the impact of the textbook in mediating the curriculum.

There is a significant spend here and it is one that is welcome in the round. It has been strongly welcomed by parents in particular and I am one of that cohort. I had three sons going to school this year and I did not need to sort them out for books, which was welcome in our household. Are we keeping an eye on the spend to make sure we are taking those other factors into account?