Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

All the positive developments that have been included in the budget were acknowledged earlier in the debate, but that serves to highlight even more the failings in the budget in terms of dealing with education. While the positives are that the budget has set out to meet the demographic requirements of a growing population of school-going children, it has neglected to deal with any of the issues remaining from the recession and austerity years. This budget, as pointed out previously in the House, is a continuation of the austerity budgets.

The budget has failed completely in even trying to examine tackling the issue of class sizes across the board. At the end of 2017, we will have the biggest class sizes in Europe. That is a damning indictment of our so-called recovery and our so-called growing economy in that the Government cannot even see its way to attempting to reduce class sizes. For the 100,000 children who are in classes of more than 30 students across our national schools, it is vitally important that class sizes are reduced. It has been proven, and this was outlined by Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan, that educational outcomes are better for children in smaller class sizes. We need to make sure that the outcomes for students are as good as they possibly can be. That is what should be at the centre of everything we are doing in terms of education.

There was nothing in the budget to address the cost of running schools. All of us in the House probably hear from parents who have to constantly fund-raise for the schools their children attend in order for the school authorities to provide heating, to be able pay electricity bills and to provide needed materials for the teaching of their children. We could have granted a pay increase for parents by reducing the burden on them of funding schools through voluntary contributions and constant fund-rasing and, thereby, put more money in their pockets by making sure that they did not have to contribute more to cover the cost of the education for their children

Barnardos estimates that an allocation of €103 million a year would make primary education free for all parents and their children. It would have been a good use of the fiscal space to make sure that primary education would be truly free. A number of other issues have not been addressed in regard to the education budget. One startling issue is the ongoing use of prefabs across the country. There are two schools in particular in County Donegal, Gaelscoil na gCeithre Máistrí where the students have been in prefab accommodation for 17 years and St. Mary's national school in Stranorlar which has 35% of its students in prefab accommodation. If we consider that we have spent €83 million in total over the past five years maintaining prefabs, we need to speed up the delivery of the capital programme to provide proper buildings for those schools.

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