Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)

I am responding to this topical issue on behalf of the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Quinn. I thank the Deputy for giving me an opportunity to outline to the House the reforms to the teacher allocation process that are being made and that will take effect from September. The overall objective of these reforms is to enable the teacher allocation and redeployment process to operate more smoothly and efficiently within the new climate of fixed ceilings on teaching posts. The detail of how the new arrangements will operate is set out in the Department's staffing circular which has now been published.

The new arrangements incorporate a long overdue updating of the GAM-learning support allocation for all schools. This inevitably involves changes to existing clustering arrangements whereby a teacher is shared between schools. A further change is that schools in any locality are being empowered to cluster and arrange their GAM resources in a manner that best suits their local needs. This should be completed by schools in March.

The new GAM allocations for schools are in five-hour blocks - equivalent to one school day - and are specifically designed to facilitate clustering arrangements between schools. Schools can operate their sharing arrangements in a manner that enables a teacher, who needs to travel to a neighbouring school, to do so from the start of the school day.

The new GAM arrangements treat all schools equally irrespective of size. A standard GAM allocation is given to all schools based on the number of classroom posts in the school in the current school year. Of the total overall allocation of approximately 4,100 posts, approximately two thirds will be in full-time, 25-hour, posts. This approach is the most straightforward and efficient method to ensure that the GAM allocation for schools reflects each school's requirements for teaching support. Given that the GAM is being updated through a redistribution of existing posts, there will inevitably be some changes in the GAM allocations at individual school level.

There are also new and separate arrangements for how resource hours for individual pupils are converted into teaching posts in schools. As part of the reforms, existing posts are being used to put in place a network of more than 2,500 full-time resource posts in close to 1,700 base schools throughout the country. These posts will be allocated on a permanent basis and the teachers in them will undertake NCSE approved, low-incidence, resource hours in the base schools or in neighbouring schools. This approach builds on the interim arrangements that operated in 2011, but in a more structured and transparent manner.

The requirement for resource hours in a school varies from year to year depending on the number, if any, of its pupils with autism, etc. Small schools generally have a lower requirement for resource hours. The new arrangements take account of the later timescale for the allocation of these hours necessitated by individual assessment by the NCSE.

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