Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

That is right. That children spend 20% of their waking hours in school per year is wonderful. Deputy English is right in that we cannot expect schools to do everything. One must look to communities and parents because we cannot expect teachers to do everything or schools to answer every problem.

We want to provide quality education for all students. When the task force was launched, I accepted the recommendation to introduce this legislation to rebalance rights, but it is important not to focus on the right to expel. The Bill is concerned with ensuring that proper considerations are taken into account during an appeals process. The first consideration listed is "the nature, scale and persistence of any behaviour alleged to have given rise to, or contributed to, the decision made by or on behalf of the board" and the reasonableness of any effort made by the school to enable the student to participate in and benefit from education.

The Bill focuses on individual students. This is as it should be because constant chattering at the back of a class could be viewed as disruptive behaviour in some schools or be ignored in others. It is important not to ignore an individual's rights, but we should recognise the rights of other students to get an education and the rights of teachers to teach. I do not accept that the Bill does not go far enough. It is a rebalancing of rights and provides guidance to an appeals board on what should be considered.

Regarding expulsions, a great deal of section 29 relates to second level schools rather than primary schools. As I told Deputies who raised the matter of second level class sizes yesterday, the schedule for primary level will be sent during the coming weeks and class sizes will be reduced in September, as was the case last year.

As I told the INTO this morning, if any Minister for Education and Science had stood before it five years ago and stated that there would be 4,000 extra primary school teachers by now, he or she would have been laughed at. If a Minister had stated ten years ago when the Government entered into office that there would be 7,000 or 8,000 extra teachers by now, the INTO would have laughed at him or her. However, both increases have come to pass.

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