Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

Deputy Smith has raised another element, namely, resource teachers and people spending teaching time in the car travelling between schools. We are examining how we can eliminate this type of waste of everyone's time.

To return to the central point raised by Deputies Boyd Barrett and Penrose, schools in rural areas have been given a signal that the pupil-teacher ratio will be changed in the next three years. I will respond flexibly if we are given the facts. There is now an onus on schools and their patrons to look at what will be the future population of a particular area. As I indicated previously, the Department is now linked with the Department of Social Protection and every child benefit payment is geographically and electronically tracked. As a result, we know what will be the population cohort in two, three or four years when a child presents.

As Deputy Penrose noted, the developing schools model serves as an example. We do not want to get into the nonsense of removing a teacher from a school in year X only to bring the teacher back in year X plus one. That approach is not common sense. By the same token, however, we have to change and move to a position in which we retain a biased pupil-teacher ratio in favour of rural schools on the basis of the nature of the location of such schools.

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