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

I thank the Minister and the officials for being here today. Like Deputy O'Sullivan, there are five issues I would like to raise, so I will rattle through them in what is a very constrained timeframe. The first is the issue of pay. Clearly, the most valuable resource within our education area is our children, but the second most valuable one is our educators. Has the Minister given consideration to the restoration of allowances for qualifications? It is difficult for teachers to make the decision to invest in themselves and their own human capital when there is not an incentive to do so. Similarly, has consideration been given to the issue of middle management posts or posts of responsibility, which to my mind represent very good value for money when you consider the work that gets done.

The second issue I raise is around the IT grants that were pulled last year. That was felt very keenly by the schools I engaged with on it. Does the Minister plan to restore or reintroduce those grants next year?

Third, on the issue of schoolbooks, I share the positive outlook the other Deputies have expressed about the free schoolbooks, but what safeguards have we in place for the quality of spend, the value for money we are getting, the ability to protect ourselves from profit maximisation from publishers, and incentives to reuse schoolbooks? I worry about the pressure to have a textbook-mediated curriculum and the pressure to finish the book. I am sure the Minister felt it when she was in the classroom. I certainly did. I also worry about the impact on small-scale retailers, in particular, who find it difficult to engage in the programme. It is almost a little bit too big for them to take on.

The fourth issue is school transport. I am glad to hear the school transport review is on the way. It is a source of recurring frustration, particularly given that on my count there are four different streams of school transport, between the transport for Ukrainian students, those in direct provision centres, special education and the general school transport system. I hope the review includes some sort of streamlining of that so that we are getting the best bang for our buck in actually getting the children to school.

The fifth might be a very minor issue, but as they say, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. Within the school transport budget, €3 million is being dedicated to Covid-19 enhanced cleaning. Three million euro might not be a huge amount in the context of the overall budget, but it is not an insignificant amount. What is it we are talking about with that? How do we monitor value for money? I am assuming most of it is spent by the private company operators. Given what we know now about how Covid is transmitted, are we spending that money effectively or are we spending it on mopping floors, which does not do anything in terms of transmission? I think that is more than enough.