Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

I move:

That Dáil Éireann noting that:

the educational needs of children are more difficult to meet in large classes;

there is growing concern among parents and teachers at the lack of progress on class sizes;

the Government has reneged on the commitment contained in An Agreed Programme for Government that the average size of classes for children under nine would be brought below the international best-practice guideline of 20:1;

there are more than 100,000 primary pupils and 35,000 second level pupils being taught in classes of 30 or more;

Ireland has currently the second highest average class size in the EU; and

additional teachers are also urgently required to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs and those from disadvantaged areas;

calls for:

the setting out of a timetable for meeting the commitment on class sizes given in An Agreed Programme for Government and to put in place the steps needed to ensure the recruitment of the additional teachers required and the provision of the extra classrooms required;

the reduction of class sizes to the European norm;

a reduction in maximum class sizes to 25:1 in mainstream classes and 15:1 in schools where there is chronic disadvantage;

sanction for the appointment of additional special needs teachers to meet current needs and to implement the terms of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act 2004; and

greater engagement between the Department of Education and Science, the planning authorities and local communities so that school needs can be delivered on a timely and orderly basis.

I wish to share time with Deputies Burton, Costello and Lynch.

Tonight is the third time in the past three years that the Labour Party has used its Private Members' time in the Dáil to raise the issue of class size. In April 2005 and May 2006, we tabled similar motions to the one I have moved on behalf of the party tonight. We have considered this issue and the logistics of how we can reduce class sizes in Ireland to what children in other European countries enjoy, and we intend to do so in the next Government.

It is important to stress that we are serious about this issue. It has been raised in a large number of public meetings with very large attendances throughout the country, and pointing out that the Labour Party has raised this issue three times in our Private Members' time is an indication that we take it very seriously and intend to reduce the class sizes to European norms.

We will not repeat the empty rhetoric of the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats programme for Government, which promised that all children under nine will be in classes of fewer than 20:1 and then proceeded to ignore that promise. The number of children in classes of 30 or more has increased rather than decreased. Failure to keep promises like that is what makes people lose faith in politics. That is one of the reasons we were all greeted with a fair degree of scepticism when we attended the Irish National Teachers Organisation meetings throughout the country in the past few weeks and it is the reason I intend, on behalf of the Labour Party, to outline the measures we will take to reach our commitment.

Essentially, there are three elements required, extra teachers, extra schools and classrooms and the revenue and capital resources to pay for them. It is not rocket science. They are three basic elements and they can be delivered if there is the political will.

We must factor in also the expected growth in the school-going population, which is estimated at an extra 100,000 in the next ten years, and a system must be put in place to pinpoint where those children will be living. Essentially, this is about forward planning, which we have not seen in the system here. That is something other European countries do as a matter of course. On the other hand, the Government has stood by and wrung its hands as if the problem had jumped up to bite it, and it had no idea how those young children were suddenly there with eager faces ready to take up their constitutional right to education.

Laytown in County Meath is a prime example of that. This has been an ongoing issue for some time. I read in the newspapers in the past week that a site may or may not be bought for a temporary school to address urgent need while the permanent one is being built. The parents there do not know what to say to their children. Will they be going to school or will they not? Will they be going to school in the locality? Will they have to travel long distances by bus or are there any spaces within bus distance of Laytown? Neighbouring schools in east Meath, such as Le Chéile Educate Together in Mornington, have faced similar problems.

The parents of Laytown spent so much time on this issue they came before the Joint Committee on Education and Science to talk to us about the solutions they believe are necessary to address the needs of these growing communities in terms of the provision of schools. They made some worthwhile proposals in that regard, but it should not be up to the parents who have suffered so much in a particular area to come up with proposals to provide school places for children. That is the job of the Government, particularly the Minister for Education and Science.

This is a fiasco born of a failure of political leadership. It is time the Government took charge of providing schools. Otherwise, we will continue to play catch-up on crisis management of numbers, particularly in the growth areas around our cities. The Labour Party has come to the view that a radical change of approach is needed to allow us plan and deliver schools and classrooms to be ready when the population needs them. My colleagues have examples in their locations of schools that are bursting at the seams, with no place to put the extra children and where it is constantly a case of crisis management.

We propose that the National Treasury Management Agency be given the task of gathering the information on where and when extra classrooms and schools will be needed and of acquiring the sites on which to build them. This should be done in co-operation with local authorities. We plan to introduce legislation to implement the recommendation of the All-Party Committee on the Constitution to ensure that land can be acquired by compulsory purchase order for educational purposes. That proposal was made some years ago but there has been no attempt by Government, despite the fact that it is a recommendation of an all-party committee, to implement the recommendation. While this proposal will probably require a substantial capital investment initially, it will save money in the longer term because the State will no longer be held over a barrel by developers who know they can practically name their price because a school is urgently needed and suitable land is in such short supply.

For example, a gaelscoil in my constituency, of which I am sure the Minister is aware, has been waiting, in atrocious temporary conditions, for more than a decade for a site to be bought because the Office of Public Works is reluctant to pay the inflated price to the public purse that is being asked for the site deemed most appropriate for the school. I am aware there are similar cases in other constituencies, and the sites are probably much more expensive around the greater Dublin area. Failure to plan is costing us money and forcing children to spend years in dilapidated, unhealthy classrooms.

There is a rash of prefabs throughout the country which are costing a considerable amount of money, whether they are being bought or rented, to the public purse. If we plan in advance and buy the land at a cheaper rate before it becomes so urgently needed that the developers can almost name their price, we will need a short-term increase in capital money but in the long term we will save money to the public purse and ensure children do not have to spend, in many cases, all their school life in a prefab.

If the provision of schools and extensions in expanding areas is a specific task for the National Treasury Management Agency, which is a Government agency with expertise and experience in this area, that will leave the Department of Education and Science's building unit and the OPW with the much more manageable job of assisting existing schools in upgrading their buildings and replacing unsuitable classrooms and prefabs.

The reason we have concentrated on the building aspect of the solution to the issue of class size is that it has been the most intractable. It is the reason most children in County Kildare, for example, must be five before they get into school and the reason in the northern part of that county only 2.2% of children are in classes of fewer than 20 and 31% are in classes of 30 or more. That statistic is a national disgrace and it is not much better in several other counties. More than 100,000 primary school children and 35,000 post-primary students are in classes of 30 or more.

If we do not address this issue now, we do a great disservice to the children of Ireland and to our future. One can imagine being a five year old in a room with 32 other five year olds trying to follow what one adult is trying to help them understand. If they do not grasp it, are they able to get the teacher's attention and will he or she be able to give them the time to explain? I think not in a class of that size, and that is the experience throughout the country for very young children for whom this is their only opportunity. If they slip back in the early years, it is much more difficult to catch up at a later stage.

One of the striking aspects about the INTO meetings has been the huge numbers of parents attending and the passion of their contributions. Parents considerably outnumbered teachers at these meetings. I was struck by how strongly the parents in my constituency felt about this issue, and I know that has been the experience in other parts of the country. They know their children are not getting the attention they need in large classes.

Children with special needs are particularly vulnerable. Most mainstream classes now have a number of children with learning support needs and many have not been allocated that support despite recommendations from psychologists and other professionals. The implementation of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act has proved a bitter disappointment in many cases. The weighted model for the allocation of resource teachers in primary schools has delivered support based on numbers rather than need and many disadvantaged schools with large numbers of children with learning difficulties have lost rather than gained teachers. Basic literacy competence has not improved in some schools in the past decade because while we have a child-centred curriculum, we do not have a child-centred allocation of resources to implement the curriculum.

There are many difficulties in schools throughout the country with regard to the allocation of those special resources, particularly in post-primary schools that do not have in situ resource teachers. Issues arise also regarding a shortage of speech and language therapists and a number of other specialists. The suggestion is that now that we have the legislation everything is sorted out for children with special needs, but that is very far from the reality in schools throughout the country.

I spoke to a number of young teachers after the INTO meeting I attended, which was packed to the doors, with some people having to overflow into the next room. Those young teachers were clearly idealistic and hugely positive about the vocation they had chosen. However, they were all very frustrated and disappointed that they could not do their job as it should be done. I was really struck by these young teachers who were trying to cope with very large numbers of children and wanted to be good teachers — and were good teachers. However, in the circumstances they were finding it extremely difficult to implement what is still described as the new curriculum in primary education, which is child-centred with the opportunity for children to work individually. It is not a talk-down curriculum. However, it is very difficult to implement it in large classes. These teachers simply could not give the kind of attention each child needed.

This brings me to the second element in reducing class sizes to EU norms, which average at 20:1 and in which we are second from bottom of the table. Only the United Kingdom has larger class sizes than we have. We need to continue to increase the number of teachers graduating from our colleges of education and universities every year. I congratulate the INTO on the work it has done on the teacher numbers required. I welcome the fact that we have a considerable number of additional teachers in the system, for which I give the Minister credit. However, it does not need to be an either-or situation. The capacity exists if there is the will to deliver. The will certainly exists in the colleges of education. The numbers who apply for undergraduate and postgraduate primary education courses and for the higher diploma in education and second level teaching-related courses continue to increase as indicated by the most recent CSO figures. The colleges are more than willing to expand their place numbers, provided they are given the necessary resources.

However, I do not accept that a choice needed to be made between class size reduction and special needs and newcomer children. The Minister knew that special needs children were to be mainstreamed as it was Government policy. In setting its priorities the Government should have known that these children would need such supports. As it has been Government policy to bring in workers from other countries to develop our economy, the number of newcomer children should not have been a surprise. The commitment in the programme for Government on class size should have been incrementally implemented over the five-year lifetime of the Government. It was a very specific commitment that both parties signed up to. Therefore it should have been politically driven and monitored.

However, we have a Government that is in charge of everything but in control of nothing. It is part of a pattern of apportioning responsibility for all the crises, from the health services to traffic gridlock to someone or something else. It claims to be helpless to do anything about all the children, sick people and cars clogging up our schools, hospitals and roads? The Government is responsible and was elected to take the actions that will make things work.

This is an issue that should be a priority for all elected representatives. Education has been at the heart of social and economic progress in Ireland. We have traditionally invested in it in so far as our wealth permitted, but that is no longer the case. While 5.4% of GDP was spent on education in 1994, it has fallen to 4.6%. We are near the bottom of the EU and OECD tables on the portion of our national wealth that we spend on education, particularly pre-school, primary and second level. The Labour Party will, in government, put education back in the centre of spending priorities again. We are committed to allocating the resources, capital and revenue, that will be needed to reduce class sizes to EU norms, which average 20:1. We know that a commitment to average size and pupil-teacher ratios are not enough in themselves. It is of no use to a child in Dublin West who is in a class of 38 children to know that elsewhere there are only ten children in her cousin's class. We also need to set maximum class size targets as specified in the motion. The measures we are proposing for the building programme will allow us to achieve such targets in a set timeframe.

The ad hoc reactive system that operates at present has seen PE halls used as classrooms, playground space eaten up by prefabs and children spending their entire school years in unventilated, squashed, damp, unhealthy conditions. I spoke to the mother of an autistic boy last Friday who told me that the local school attended by the rest of her children has a problem taking her son, who is ready for mainstream, because of concerns that there will not be room in the classroom for the adult who will be needed for a limited period of time to help him to cope with the transition from the one-to-one system he has had to full participation in the class. I know that my colleagues can outline other cases of classes with insufficient space.

We are aware of the problems that are being stored up for these children into the future if we do not comprehensively address their needs as they develop. This is solvable if the will exists. I urge all Members to support the motion. I am disappointed that the Government has tabled an amendment. We should have united in supporting the motion which concerns planning for the next generation. It can be done and the resources exist to do it.

See this speech in context