Michael Finneran (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fianna Fail)

I am responding on behalf of my colleague, the Minister for Education and Science. I thank the Deputy for raising this matter as it provides me with the opportunity to outline the position with regard to the application for large-scale capital funding from Forgney national school. The school has a staffing of a principal, one mainstream teacher and a shared resource teacher. The school's enrolment at 30 September 2007 was 22 pupils.

The school authority has applied to the Department of Education and Science for capital funding for a new school building. In the context of this application, the local inspector has confirmed that the school is expected to maintain its current enrolment and staffing level. It is not, therefore, experiencing the rapid increase in enrolments that has occurred in other schools throughout the country.

The Deputy will appreciate that modernising facilities in 3,200 primary and 750 post-primary schools is not an easy task given the decades of underinvestment in this area as well as the need to respond to emerging needs in areas of rapid population growth. The Government has a sincere determination, however, to ensure that all children are educated in appropriate facilities to enable the implementation of a broad and balanced curriculum. This is evidenced by the scale of funding made available under the former and the current national development plans and the capital funding for school buildings announced in the budget this week.

The Department of Education and Science must prioritise how it spends its capital funding to ensure that it is targeted at areas and schools most in need. That is the reason prioritisation criteria were introduced and published. These criteria show how projects are categorised and how they are selected for inclusion in a capital programme. Under the criteria, the proposed project for Forgney national school has been assigned a band two rating reflecting the fact that the standard of its existing accommodation is such that it needs to be replaced by a new building.

Thousands of building projects were carried out under the last national development plan to provide new and modernised educational infrastructure and thousands more will be carried out under the new plan. However, there must be order in how this happens and a realisation that not all building projects can proceed together. The extent of the demand on the capital budget is enormous. That budget is providing accommodation for new communities together with accommodation for the unprecedented number of extra teachers the Government has put into the system. The Department of Education and Science also must modernise much of the existing stock as a result of the historic underinvestment in that stock.

All this work will not be achieved overnight. However, the Department has made huge inroads and will continue to build on the success of the last national development plan, when the Department delivered 7,800 building projects. As the Minister, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, said, this must be done in an orderly and planned manner and on the basis of the most pressing need. Projects will be advanced incrementally through the system, over time, consistent with the priority attaching to them which is reflected in the band rating assigned to them. Individual projects will be allowed to proceed, in order of priority as and when the funding situation permits. The school building project for Forgney national school will be considered for progression in this context.

I again thank the Deputy for raising this matter. The Department's planning and building unit will be in contact with the school authority as further progress is made on its project.

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