Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What the Department has identified is a gap. It is not a priority; it is a gap. I am saying the officials should reflect on it and come back to us with a solution.

I want to focus on three areas if I can get through the next couple of minutes. I was delighted to see the school secretaries programme through which secretaries were taken on to the payroll system for the Department of Education. It provides security. It treats them equally with other professionals within the school campus. Unfortunately, I believe it has created an anomaly around the ancillary grants.

Five schools in my area have basically had their ancillary grant deducted because the school secretary salary has been effectively deducted from that grant. They now have to employ a caretaker, who is the other beneficiary of that grant. The five figures I have for a caretaker for €8,300, €7,800, €1,800, €8,500 and €10,000. None of those schools will be able to secure a full-time caretaker for that figure. There is a problem in the way we have applied the reduction to the ancillary grant. That is my first comment.

It feeds in then to my second comment. All the schools I talk about are large schools that were built in the 1950s and 1960s. Demographics have changed. They do not have the same number of pupils in those schools, but they have huge school buildings. The ancillary grant is based on capitation. We have, therefore, caretakers in huge sites in very old buildings who just cannot meet the needs. Equally, the capitation grant for the school is based on pupil numbers. There is something we have to do, which falls into the category we just talked about. On the north side of Dublin, there are a huge number of old schools that were built in the 1960s. We cannot provide new school buildings. It would not be environmentally beneficial to do that either. However, we are hamstringing them because they have a reduced number of pupils per capita. Sometimes, they have a reduced number of pupils because of other challenges they have in the area. There might be large issues in the area around DEIS and so on. Therefore, we have to look at those big schools that have low numbers of pupils and at the capitation grant. Separately, however, we absolutely need to do something immediately on the ancillary grant because caretakers are going to be laid off.