Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Joan Burton.

This is an important motion, although it is focused on a particular aspect of the current crisis in primary education. The crisis has been caused by the trigger that has resulted in a number of schools automatically losing a teacher because their pupil numbers have dropped a very small margin. It underlines the crisis that faces primary education, one that has been growing for some time. As recently as 1995, the then Minister for Education who reformed so much of the system, Niamh Bhreathnach, published a White Paper. Within the confines of that paper we speculated on how we would manage a decline in the number of primary school pupils. There are 450,000 primary school pupils in 3,300 schools. According to the most recent census forecast, by 2025, 17 years from now, that population will grow to a maximum of 650,000 and will have a minimum of an extra 100,000 on the current figures. I do not refer only to the outlying growth areas around the greater Dublin area, Cork or Limerick. Existing schools are confronted by growth within their areas because of the surge in population. Only 10% of the growth is being generated by newcomer children, whose parents are coming to this country to work in our economy and who we are trying to integrate into our society.

The current system of operation in the Department of Education and Science is no longer fit for purpose. Due to commitments related to the Lisbon treaty I could not attend last night's debate but I read the Minister's reply to my colleague in Fine Gael with responsibility for education, Deputy Brian Hayes. Will the Minister tell someone in the Department of Education and Science to turn off the word processor and stop telling us how good he is and about the increases in moneys? The increases are not catching up or maintaining pace with the increases in the pupil population. I invite anyone in the Chamber and the Visitors Gallery to read the reply. If the Minister does not provide the increase in teachers' pay and relate this to the increase in spending and inflation, the real value of any increase must be considerably discounted. The primary education system of allocation of teachers does not work. For teachers of mainstream classes including children with special needs the challenging behaviour of the pupil cannot be accommodated because the special educational needs officer report and the psychological report has not been accepted and therefore the special needs assistant has not be allocated. This means primary school teachers must cope with pupils of challenging behaviour that is disruptive to the rest of the pupils.

The promise on pupil-teacher ratios, which the Government has reneged on, has become more critical. There is a dispute among educationalists as to whether pupil-teacher ratio is the be all and end all. In principle and as a parent I accept the idea of mainstreaming children with disability but it places an additional burden on primary school teachers if the numbers are kept high. The automatic guillotine that kicks in is crude and disruptive to schools and requires all sorts of internal management.

The Minister suggested yesterday that this has nothing to do with the Department of Education and Science, that individual schools make choices and that having 30 children in one classroom and 20 in another is a decision made by the school for which the Minister has no responsibility. That is dumping responsibility for the Minister's decision on the boards of management and the principals who struggle to provide education in the classroom as well as finding money to pay for water charges.

I welcome the appointment of the Minister and invite him to return to the drawing board and examine the crisis he has inherited. As The Irish Times stated a few days ago, we cannot have a knowledge-based economy in the future, with millions spent on PhDs if our primary schools are so decrepit that the Minister cannot tell me how many prefab classrooms we have in our primary school system, two months after I asked the question.

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