Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 3 October 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Current and Future Plans of the School Building Unit: Department of Education

Mr. Hubert Loftus:

The funding for that is coming through the climate action fund and that creates particular requirements in relation to the strategy and business case for it. We have engaged extensively with the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications on that. I think we are very much at the concluding stages of that engagement. There are just a couple of remaining issues to work through and it is more at a higher level than individual specifics. We are working through some of the strategy issues. Working this through at an individual school level is fine, but working it through across 4,000 schools and managing that and managing the process for that is different. Our overall approach on this is to keep it as streamlined and straightforward for individual schools as possible, so that is where we are working that through currently.