Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

With these areas now largely addressed, in the current school year extra teachers were provided to reduce class sizes and, as Deputies will be aware, the Government has already committed to providing another 800 primary school teachers next September.

In the course of this debate, some Members will bring up examples of primary schools with which they are familiar that have large classes in particular grades and will try to claim these are typical of the situation in our school system as a whole, but that is not the case. Not only is the average class size at national level now 24, but all primary schools are staffed on the basis of a general rule of at least one classroom teacher for every 28 pupils. This is down from one teacher for 29 pupils in the last school year and it is being reduced to one for 27 from next September.

It is important to appreciate there are a number of different reasons a particular school may have a large class in a given year. Large classes can result from a significant fluctuation in enrolments from one year to the next. They may also be the result of a decision by the school principal not to have multi-grade classes. When I examine why a particular school has a class of 35 pupils in a particular grade, the reason is that there is another class in the same school with just 15 pupils.

I appreciate that splitting classes may not always be an option because, for example, there might be a large group in junior infants and a small group in sixth class and so on. However, where it is possible, I believe 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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