Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)

Unfortunately, the budgetary and academic years do not coincide and anomalous cases always arise when a change is made to the pupil-teacher ratio in the middle of the academic year. This is not unusual and it happened in the past when previous Governments implemented changes to the pupil-teacher ratio. The number of pupils required for retention of a teacher was increased and the Department used the numbers enrolled the previous September to work out the posts that would be retained or lost the following September.

The appeals process sets out deliberately to resolve the anomaly that has arisen from the recent budgetary change. Such concession has not been available to schools in the past and I am glad it will be from now on. Minority faith schools, gaelscoileanna and schools in Gaeltacht areas will also have access to the new appeals process. It sets out to address the potential anomaly whereby we might have removed a teaching post from a school only to find that the pupil numbers dictated that the post would have to be reinstated the following year. The process will take that into account and if a school is experiencing an upward trend in enrolment, it should have no fears about losing posts. It is, however, important to realise that if schools are showing a static or downward trend in enrolment, it will be difficult to make the case to sustain teaching posts in that instance.

See this speech in context