Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

One and a half million students from junior infants to leaving certificate is the student population in full-time education. We can breeze through Navan in the Minister's constituency, Sixmilebridge or Ennis in my constituency or any town in Ireland these mornings because schools are already closed or are closing tomorrow. There is something fundamentally wrong there. When schools are closed, congested roads are freed up. It is about that joined-up thinking that Eoghan Murphy sought and which we all aspire to. Please let us have a lightbulb moment at Cabinet. If this was done right, we threw a ball of money at the Department of education to fix school transport and did not have 150 cars doing a school drive-off each morning, it could solve many of Ireland Inc.'s problems.

My next point is about teacher burnout. I spent many years in a classroom. In all the years I was a teacher, the school year did not get longer. It is still 183 days. The school day did not get longer either, yet the expectation of what the teacher could deliver has doubled or trebled in some instances. It is everything from childhood obesity and digital awareness to sexual consent and RSE. To speak to Deputy Cummins' point, it is all the tools young people need growing up and the things we as a society need to fix for young people. There is a parental expectation but it does not always happen there, so it is back into the school environment.

Yet with all of that happening, the expectation of what a teacher has to do in terms of accountability to the inspectorate and the Department has also increased. The only tool I know of that has been given to teachers - maybe it has changed in the few years since I left a classroom - is an NCCA planning tool. You can click little options and give your cuntas míosúil, your monthly account of what content you taught in your classroom. We are getting to a point where nurses will say they spend half the time back in the office filling in the charts. Teachers will say they spend half the time filling in reports for the Department in the evening. They do not inform teaching going forward. There needs to be accountability but it has gone on overdrive.

Those in the teaching profession will say that the eyes of the Department of education, not just on the Minister's watch but for decades, have looked across the pond to Britain. The thinking has been that if they moved to this high accountability model over there in the 1960s and 70s, well Jesus, we need to get there too. That is not always the case. The three R's of Irish education which have stood to us and have put us at the top of the education mountain in the world, namely, reading, writing and arithmetic, are often forgotten. Just when you about to open the book, read the novel and deal with literacy, another circular comes in about cineáltas or to do this or that. Could the Minister speak to the point of teacher burnout and could the Department please, in the age of AI and high digitisation, look at better ways of teachers being accountable to the inspectorate and the Department without having to churn out reams of paper that ultimately just gather cobwebs and dust?