Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

I wish to share my time with Deputy Brendan Smith and Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív who, I anticipate, will arrive in the nick of time. We have 15 minutes to speak so it will be a difficult challenge to deal with all aspects of this issue.

Since it came to office, this Government has placed a higher priority on the presentation of announcements than on their content. Nowhere was this clearer than during the week of budget announcements in December. Ministers and backbenchers alike operated to the same set of speaking points, central to which was the claim that the budget was based on being fair. In area after area, the implementation of the budget has been shown to be the exact opposite. It is the most regressive and unfair budget for many years, and the commentary of the ESRI has testified to this, with the targeted cuts to fall more on those who have the least. This is just as true in the area of education as it is for the Government's tax and welfare policies. When spending plans were announced, the Government stated that education was being spared, with the pupil teacher ratio being left untouched. That was the greatest deceit articulated during the budget debate itself.

The budget documentation states that "a key priority is to continue to prioritise and target available funding at schools with the most concentrated levels of educational disadvantage". We know that the detail of the budget has shown exactly the opposite. The pupil teacher ratio in schools will rise significantly this year, with the removal of nearly 600 posts from disadvantaged schools, 800 posts in guidance counselling and 100 posts in rural schools. That is in the Minister's documentation, yet the first half of his speech was gobbledegook. He should stop insulting people with language such as "the general allocation model has been updated". In the name of God, does he know what that means? It means that posts are being lost. There are seven schools in my own area with DEIS band 2 status, and they will lose 30 posts. The updating of the general allocation model to those schools means a reduction of 30 posts. Let us stop this language which represents a complete disconnect with the reality on the ground. The Minister says he is talking to principals, but principals will tell him about this if he actually talks to them. Three schools with DEIS band 1 status in my area have lost nine posts.

This is unacceptable. I have not witnessed such an unprecedented assault on disadvantaged schools in a long time. No school can be expected to shoulder a loss of two school teachers in a DEIS 1 school or a loss of three or even five teachers in some DEIS band 2 schools. That is what is happening through this gobbledegook about updating general allocation models, five hour blocks of resources and the changes in respect of language teaching supports. Adding it all up means double and treble whammies on the impact on teacher numbers in schools. It is the children who need it most who are suffering. I have met the teachers and the parents in the schools in many communities. They are in absolute despair.

The latter half of the Minister's speech was a bit better in terms of the impact of DEIS itself. That is the point. DEIS is actually working. It is having a huge impact on literacy and numeracy achievements and school planning. The Department's inspectorate carried out a report on the DEIS model for school planning, and recommended that it be rolled out to every other school in the country. It will be impossible to carry out such school planning if the Minister goes ahead with these cuts. Why then does the Minister impose these cuts on the schools if all the demonstrable evidence is that it is working to great effect?

Sometimes Ministers and backbenchers claim that they have no option and they have been forced to take these actions due to circumstances imposed on them. However, the Minister's own document shows that he proposed these cuts himself to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. On 9 September 2011, the Minister finished his review of education spending and sent it to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. He dealt with the disadvantage schemes at length. He acknowledged that they had been independently studied and had delivered undeniable progress for many thousands of pupils. In spite of this, he recommended cutting these posts because he could not find any "objective and equality grounds" for retaining them. In other words, the Minister proposed these cuts because he felt they were the right thing to do, not because he was forced to do so.

Part of the spending review on the national literacy and numeracy initiative has been withheld from the public, but the details which are available show that key parts of it are to be funded through those cuts to school supports. It is political cynicism of the worst type to cut support for a disadvantaged scheme in order for the Minister to claim that he is creating another one. He has repeatedly said that the DEIS scheme should apply uniformly to all disadvantaged schools, but that goes directly against the evidence that we cannot have a one size fits all approach to disadvantaged schools and pupils. There are different scales of disadvantage and different issues, which is why we retain the staffing of the earlier schemes when DEIS was set up. These schools have extra supports, not because of a legacy issue, but because they actually need them. Studies have repeatedly shown how literacy, numeracy, home schools links, school completion programmes have all significantly improved the work of the teachers whose posts are being cut. The benefit to families, communities and the entire country from this modest spending has been enormous. The sudden withdrawal of so many posts will have a huge and damaging impact.

I believe there are alternatives to this. I ask the Minister not to rely on reviews and reports, but to accept the general consensus. Our first motion under Private Members' business was about education. We wanted to be constructive and say that all parties in the House should affirm the primacy of education as the key pillar for equality of opportunity, reflecting our republican ideals and principles. I ask the Minister to reverse the cuts on the DEIS schools, and to allow them to continue to build on the outstanding progress that has undeniably been made. I appeal to him to respond to this debate this evening by reversing the cuts to the DEIS schools and retaining the posts.

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