Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I am responding on behalf of my colleague, the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Quinn, who regrets he is unable to be here, to this matter regarding the allocation process for primary schools, including the reforms to the teacher allocation process that are being made and will take effect from September 2012.

While the Government has tried to protect front line services, difficult choices had to be made to identify savings across all Departments, in line with the requirements of the EU-IMF programme of support for Ireland. Achieving savings in education is particularly difficult given the significant increases in the overall number of pupils in our schools. Notwithstanding this the Government has protected the 28:1 pupil-teacher ratio at primary level, prioritised targeted support for the most disadvantaged schools and maintained the overall number of resource teachers and SNAs to support children with special needs.

The staffing arrangements for the 2012-13 school year are set out in primary circular 0007/2012 which is available on the Department of Education and Skills website. This includes the detail of the reform of the allocation process, which is designed to bring a more equitable distribution of existing posts between schools. 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 by 16 March.

There are also new and separate arrangements for how resource hours for individual pupils are converted into teaching posts in schools. 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. All of the changes are designed to enable a more efficient operation of the teacher allocation and redeployment process in the new climate of a fixed ceiling of teacher numbers.

Deputies will be aware that Budget 2012 provided for the phased withdrawal of approximately 428 posts allocated to some schools under disadvantage programmes prior to the introduction of the DEIS, Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, initiative in 2005. As already announced, the withdrawal of 192 posts from primary schools outside DEIS band 1 and 2 and from DEIS second level schools will proceed, including the 38 posts from 15 non-DEIS schools, which includes the school referred to by the Deputies and in respect of which representations have been made to the Minister by Senator Denis Landy.

The staffing schedule also includes an appeals mechanism for schools to submit an appeal under certain criteria to an independent appeals board. Details of the criteria for appeals are contained in the aforementioned primary circular. The existing staffing appeals criteria have been extended to enable limited phasing arrangements for schools where the combination of budget and reform measures has a particularly adverse impact on a school's overall allocation. Schools such as the one referred to by my colleagues in the House which are due to lose three or more posts as a result of a combination of the budget and reform measures will be able to apply to the staffing appeals board with a view to seeking to have a portion of the loss in posts deferred to the 2013-14 school year. The closing date for submission of appeals for the April meeting of the appeals board is 23 March. The appeals board operates independently of the Department and its decision is final. The precise date in April for the appeals board meeting has not yet been set, but it is envisaged it will be held before redeployment panels are published. This, therefore, will avoid surplus permanent teachers being unnecessarily placed on the published redeployment panels in respect of those schools which are successful in the appeals process. However, it is important to note that all schools which have surplus permanent teachers for redeployment are required to return the completed redeployment forms to the Department on or before Friday, 16 March.

The Department will be working with schools and the relevant education partners to ensure these new arrangements operate as efficiently as possible. The final staffing position for all schools, including the school in question, ultimately will not be known until later in 2012. At that stage, the allocation process will be fully completed and any appeals to the appeals board will have been considered.

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