Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Any teacher who gets paid a salary by the taxpayer - 99.9% - from 31 January this year must be registered with the Teaching Council to get paid. There are 87,000 such teachers. We will now be exploring with the Teaching Council what their skill sets are. Most secondary teachers register and provide their first and second subject, and we will look at how that supply can be managed, as any prudent manpower policy would do. The publicity given to the NAPD's report sends a signal to people coming through an arts, mathematics or physics course that there will be employment for such teachers over the next few years. They can then apply to do a postgraduate course that will give them the qualifications for a post-primary teacher. We are concerned about this. We now have access to information that we never had before, and I intend to use that.

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