Mr. Michael Gillespie:

On that point, we have a strange situation where permanent teachers can only be appointed in September and October. Surely if people can come back, they should be able to get permanent appointments in the middle of the year. It makes no sense that this restriction, which goes back to years before my time, is in place that appointments are only made after the summer holidays. With computers, that should not happen.

On the DEIS issue, the contradictions are huge. I was a secondary school teacher and I taught in the only school in a town. Three largest national schools that fed into it were DEIS schools, and yet the secondary school did not get DEIS status, with the things that would go to support those coming from DEIS schools. Therefore, we had to try to make do and counteract that. There are inconsistencies there, and that really needs to be tackled. What needs to be done immediately is to increase the number of teachers, because more teachers would lead to smaller classes and support what we are looking for.