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:
I have a few points. On the planning and building unit and our performance and evaluation, our core metric is making sure there is a school place for all children in a timely manner. That is ultimately our metric and what we are about. Looking at the scale of operation across 4,000 schools with nearly 1 million students, that is achieved in the vast majority of cases.
As part of getting feedback, one of the initiatives we did recently was hold an education buildings conference. We had one last year and we plan to have another next year. That is a way for us to engage with stakeholders in a different environment and get different perspectives. Another area we looked at and increase our engagement on is with our neighbours in the North and the UK. Just recently, we had a delegation over from Japan who were visiting to learn from the planning and building unit. They were hugely impressed with our forward planning, our GIS and things like that. My opposite number there who is head of the planning and building unit and also appears before parliamentary committees was quite surprised that I would be asked to answer on individual projects at such committees. However, I suppose that is the nature-----