Mr. John Boyle:

I thank Deputy Feighan for acknowledging our work. We do lobby very hard before the budget. I suppose it is a bit ironic really. The issues that we are lobbying on this year will be common to the schools and the education system in the North but, unfortunately, we do not have an opportunity to lobby there as there is nobody to lobby. The largest class sizes in the OECD are in the UK and Ireland, including Northern Ireland. The lowest level of funding for the education system as part of GDP is also in the UK and Ireland. There are not many opportunities for promotion for teachers and that might be one of the reasons so many of them are not working in Northern Ireland or the Republic. Unfortunately, there is very little support for children's mental health. If we had a campaign in the North, it would be very similar.

One of the issues that has been a great success in terms of teacher mobility is that teachers who train overseas generally have to stay in that jurisdiction to complete their induction, but we got an exception made, first of all for Covid since a lot of them were learning online, and then for the teacher supply crisis in the South, we have an exception for this year. Unfortunately, the exception is due to end on 1 February. That exception immediately resulted in about 80 teachers returning to do their induction here, primarily from England, Scotland and Wales. They went straight back into employment here. Otherwise they would have had to stay over there for two years. As Mr. McCamphill rightly identified, when you go to college over there and get used to the curriculum and working there for two years you might be less likely to return. We have been pressing the Teaching Council to extend the exemption beyond February because, for example, any young Irish person who is studying to be a teacher in England at the moment will miss the boat on this if they are in their first year. There are plenty of measures like that, which would be beneficial not only to the education system but would signal for the future that borders do not really matter. If you want to come back and work in Ireland you can work in Ireland, whether you want to work in the North or the South.

The report issued by the ESRI this week picked up on career guidance and identified that a lot more could be done in both jurisdictions in that regard. As Mr. McCamphill rightly said, there are not as many students in Northern Ireland studying foreign languages and a foreign language of often required to get into universities here. There is a good bit of tidying up to do there too.