Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

Education is a key that unlocks a child's potential and it is incumbent on the Government, the Department of Education and Skills, teachers, teachers' unions and parents to ensure this is done in the best possible way. Education is about the child, the child is central to the debate and what is best for the child must be the focus at all times. The education debate should not be about jobs or the retention and creation of posts. Rather, it should be about the quality of education delivered in the classroom, in the resource teacher's room, in lecture halls, in small rural two-teacher schools, in large urban 32-teacher schools and in DEIS band one and DEIS band two schools. The Government has pledged itself to prioritise the rights of the child and budget 2012 ensures this commitment to children is upheld in respect of educational resources.

I welcome the Minister's pledge to review the DEIS band one and band two schools and to establish the facts around staffing and the pupil-teacher ratio. We need to have certainty about what resources we deliver in terms of attainment and outputs.

Today the education inspectorate will publish two reports and the ERC in Drumcondra will publish one report, which will give us more insight and shine a light on what exactly is happening in our classrooms. The initiatives being proffered by DEIS band one and band two schools will be examined. We need these data to make decisions.

I pay tribute to the wonderful work being done by class teachers and resource teachers in the power hour initiative, the reading recovery initiative and many more initiatives. However, we have a problem in education and specific areas need to be addressed. The one that stands out is the national numeracy and literacy results from the PISA report. Those results show that the levels of numeracy and literacy have significantly decreased and that issue needs to be addressed.

I ask the Minister to ensure he introduces reform of the implementation of the literacy and numeracy strategy. We need to put that focus back into our classrooms. I commend him on introducing an extra year of training in our teacher training colleges. I ask him to ensure that in that year teachers are trained specifically in how to teach reading and mathematics in our schools to ensure our children can compete with the best in the world. I understand everyone's difficulties in terms of DEIS band one and band two schools, rural schools and all of that but what is important is what is going on in the classroom. It is not about teachers' jobs, teachers' unions or anything else.

See this speech in context