Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

Additional working hours are being introduced in schools. We touched on this already. There are also additional working hours in the higher education sector. This results in increased teaching and lecturing time and the effective elimination of school closures. We are doing a verification exercise with the schools and hope to have the result in the near future.

We estimate that teachers are working 2 million additional hours, thereby reducing the amount of school planning and the number of staff meetings during tuition time, and reducing the incidence of school closures. We have a costing for that but I will not refer to it now.

Within higher education, flexibility in the organisation of working time has been a very significant issue. Lecturing staff are available to deliver an additional two hours of lectures per week, resulting in a saving of 150,000 hours. Under the terms of the agreement, there is a new revised contract for academic staff in the universities, which provides for additional time and facilitates teaching and learning in the universities. There are 100,000 additional hours.

The reduction in budgets in the face of the increase in student numbers has enabled the institutions to live within funding, although they are extremely challenged in this regard. We have reduced the number of posts of responsibility in schools by approximately 6,000, effectively by filling them only in very rare cases. We put in place some very effective redeployment arrangements. This means that, as pupil-teacher ratios have increased, or other teacher allocations have decreased, we have been able to redeploy. This has been working very effectively at second level, resulting in the redeployment of 262 teachers, the surplus at the start of the 2011-12 school year.

We have very effective redeployment arrangements at primary level. There were some in place already but we have managed to enhance them. We have introduced a number of key initiatives. The single student grant scheme is an example of a shared service being introduced. There is much common procurement, especially in higher education. We are moving on to consider shared services. I could elaborate further but what I have said suggests the high level of activity.