Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

With Fianna Fail safely back in office, does the Minister care? She may believe that she has had the last laugh, particularly on the INTO and the various educational interests. Such is her arrogance that the abandonment of the promise on class sizes was announced via a website notice. Many principals are discovering that their promised extensions have slipped from being urgent to some undefined time in the future as the Minister seeks to take the axe to significant elements of the capital programme for school extensions and refurbishments and the replacement of prefabs.

The basic costs faced by schools — water charges, refuse collection and insurance — are all escalating dramatically. Schools across the country are struggling to provide a basic service, to keep the heating on, the water running and the doors open. This is a far cry from the idyllic digital school of the 21st century referred to on the website, not even taking into account computers, physical education gear and school books. In a modern education system, these should not be optional extras.

The Minister's failure to fund primary schools properly stands alongside her other great failure to introduce a proper system of preschool education. While primary education is maintained by her as the Cinderella of the education system, there is not even a chance that children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, will get the type of preschool education that all of the research shows pays dividends for life for the child, the family and society. It is remarkable that the Early Start system introduced by her predecessor, the Labour Party Minister for Education, Niamh Breathnach, when resources were tighter and the Celtic tiger was growing, remains as a lonely project in giving poorer children a head start.

Fund-raising for primary schools is a long established and even cherished tradition in this country. Ambitious boards of management and parents' associations hold Christmas fairs, Easter fairs and race nights — name it and they do it — to improve their children's access to the best education possible. This fund-raising, which has been an important bonding element for school communities down the decades, is meant to be for extras such as computers, sports facilities, gardens, music, landscaping school grounds and so on. Some years ago, the Taoiseach spoke of his admiration for Mr. Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, and about the need to create social connections and social capital in an increasingly alienated society. In many ways, fund-raising by school communities is almost a model of that type of social community, but for the Minister to rely on the social capital of school communities for fund-raising for essential expenses is to abuse the endless goodwill of parents, never mind the burden it imposes on school principals.

Since the Minister took control of the Department of Education and Science, school principals are busier as they cope with the never-ending increase in the mountain of paperwork that she has instructed her Department to demand of them. Just as drowning schools in paperwork is becoming less fashionable in the UK because of the time it takes away from teaching and learning, our Department decided that this paper chase would be a fabulous way of slowing down demands for educational resources so that principals, teachers and boards are left chasing extensions. How does the Minister expect principals and boards of management to fund-raise to meet core expenses when they are already too busy dealing with the paperwork for special needs applications for children, not to mention the section 29 appeals by parents who cannot get their children into local schools because there are not enough places to cater for those in the thousands of houses that have been built in growing areas such as my constituency of Dublin West? I called on the Minister to sit down with all of the parties involved in education in areas such as Dublin West and to plan how to best use resources to give all of our children a head start in education.

The situation of school planning, site acquisition and budgetary provision can only be described as a dog's dinner. Schools that have been promised extensions, such as St. Brigid's in Beechpark in Castleknock, have been dropped from the urgent list to some indefinite time in the future. At a time when the Minister expresses concern about a developing obesity crisis among school children, Castleknock Community College's gymnasium, which has been promised for more than nine years by Fianna Fáil, seems to have disappeared from the urgent list.

Just as the building boom collapses and house building stops in Dublin West, the Minister and her Department refuse to discuss with local principals school enrolment requirements on a reasoned basis. Last year, the Minister presided over the late formation of two schools for international children only, one in Castleknock — Scoil Colm — and the Educate Together school in Balbriggan. Recently, the Minister sent copies of Diarmaid Ferriter's biography of de Valera to schools around the country, but de Valera, Collins, James Connolly or Padraig Pearse could not have envisaged doing as the Minister has done, that is, "cherishing" our children so that newcomer and immigrant children would be kept apart from local Irish children in schools reserved for them only. Shame on the Minister for not having the courage to sit down and discuss this issue.

Just a few weeks ago, the Minister defied in the House the just demands of parents of autistic children for access to applied behaviour analysis. This week we learned that 17 schools are waiting for the Minister and her counterpart in the Department of Health and Children to sort out resourcing for the special autism units in primary schools. Castleknock Educate Together, a fine school, is lying locked and empty.

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