Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I was not discussing buildings, I was discussing the availability of teachers. Retirements, secondments and extra needs in the classrooms mean the issue is the availability of the number of teachers. An allocation of 500 extra teachers in one school year is extremely generous and will make a great difference to our schools. It is due to the reduction in class size and special needs, and is a more generous allocation because of the development of schools.

Regarding international children, a new issue which arose during the past few years is that 800 teachers in primary and secondary schools, with a breakdown of 600 to 200, do nothing else except teach English as a foreign language. That could not have been anticipated five years ago. I accept certain schools have a particular concentration of such children who make up a high percentage of the entire school population. Department officials have visited a number of these schools. We had meetings with the education partners and are in the process of working out a policy. The allocation of two, or even three, teachers is not sufficient in some schools.

The allocation of language support for two years is not sufficient for all children. We recognise wider cultural issues exist and that the idea of having supports for their families is equally important. These children receive language lessons in school and go home where English is not spoken, which does not help them to progress. I am actively working on this issue. That all adds to the number of teachers we need. It might have been much easier to assign these teachers to the under-nines if I had not had to deal with the special needs children, for whom 5,000 teachers provide learning support. I also target disadvantaged students, and assigned 800 teachers to deal specifically with language.

It is not possible to deal with everything at the same time and we must decide on the priorities. Special needs and disadvantage are the top priorities on which we will continue to focus. At the same time we have made real progress on reduction of the class size in this year's schedule and next year's schedule.

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