Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

Yes. The Private Members' motion before the House concentrates on the areas of class sizes, special education and school planning. Having visited more than 400 schools in two and a half years and met parents, teachers and students throughout the country in small one or two-teacher schools and in large schools with more than 1,000 pupils, I have seen at first hand the progress we have made. I am happy to have the opportunity to outline what is being achieved.

First, I will address class size, which is an issue we take seriously. There are now 10,000 more teachers on my Department's payroll than there were in 1997. A total of 8,000 of these are primary teachers. As a result of these increases in staffing, not only are children with special needs and those from disadvantaged areas getting better support than ever before, but primary class sizes have been reduced to their lowest level ever. When the Government came into office there were 80,000 more children in classes of more than 30 than there are now. It is worth saying that.

Over the past ten years, a revolution has taken place in our schools, with the largest increase in teacher numbers in Irish history. The average primary class size has been reduced from 27 to 24. With all the extra support teachers now in place, there is now one teacher for every 17 primary pupils, down from one for 22 in 1997. While more remains to be done to reduce class sizes further, it should be acknowledged how much progress has been made in this area in recent years.

It should also be acknowledged that, in providing 5,000 extra primary teachers since 2002, the Government had to decide how best to use these posts. If all of them had gone into classroom teaching, our class sizes would be a lot smaller than they are today. However, we decided, rightly in my view, to target children with special needs and those from disadvantaged areas in the first instance, and in so doing we have greatly improved the teaching support available to such pupils.

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