Mr. Paul Fiorentini:

I endorse what Mr. Duffy has said. The reality is that schools do not have a big role to play in determining the terms and conditions immediately. Schools can only pay what they have in their budget. We must remember that it is not just a reduction in caretakers or clerical officers. Since 2009, we have had an 11% annual cut in the overall budget. To maintain services of any kind, schools have often had to be inventive and may have arrived at ad hocemployment contract situations that are not really what schools want and are certainly not designed to create the situations Mr. Pike has described. To survive in the past half dozen years, many schools have found themselves taking money out of their overall budget, which they would have spent in other areas, and diverting it in fractions to allow for the provision of ten or 15 hours of a caretaker or cleaner, simply because they were restricted to having one caretaker and one clerical officer. There is a bigger issue at stake here as well. We would all like to arrive at a situation where schools are properly resourced in respect of financing and personnel. The two cannot be separated.