Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

What we did was meet each of those priorities, which any Government would be proud to stand over, and I am proud we made those our priorities. They are the children who needed our support most. If Deputy Burton would have done any differently, I would love to hear it.

I accept some schools have particularly large class sizes. That is not indicative of every school in every county around the country. The national average class is 24 and the staffing is on a general rule of at least one classroom teacher for every 29 children. Some schools, such as smaller schools, have a much more generous allocation.

It is important to remember that there are a number of different reasons that a school may have large classes in a given year. These include a significant fluctuation in enrolments from year to year or a decision by the school principal not to have multi-grade classes in some cases. Regardless of the reason there is a large class in a particular school one year, it should be noted that in the majority of cases, this is not repeated in the following year. In the main, the same schools do not have large classes year after year and so the same children are not in large classes year after year.

I previously mentioned that schools are staffed on the basis of a general rule of one teacher for every 29 pupils. A scenario where some classes in a school have class sizes of greater than 29 may arise because of a decision to use the teaching resources to have smaller classes at other levels. Indeed one can often see that if a particular school had a class of 35 in a grade, which no school should have because staff numbers are there, the answer would be that there is another class in the same school with a much lower than average number of pupils in it.

I accept that splitting classes may not always be an option in every school as there might be a large group in junior infants and a small group in sixth class and so on. Where it is possible, principals should consider the benefits of having smaller multi-grade classes as against having large differences in class sizes at different levels in the school.

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