Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

No, it is unfair to say there are teachers in schools whom pupils may never see. The people who are not counted in class-size number are the principal, deputy principal, home-school liaison officers, resource, learning support and special needs teachers. These are staff the pupils will see every day but they are not teaching, say, Irish, English, maths, history, geography in the classroom.

The Deputy is wrong in how he put his question. The average class-size is determined by the number of mainstream classroom teachers divided by the number of children. Schools are allocated a teacher for every 27 children. Smaller schools are much more generous; for example, one can get schools consisting of 12 children that can have two teachers. The pupil-teacher ratio is calculated by every teacher in a school, whether it is a classroom or learning support teacher, divided by the number of students. That is why it is as low as 1:16 in some schools.

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