Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Between September of last year and this coming September, my Department will have employed 4,800 additional teachers. We are making a very substantial investment to respond to the demographic pressure. To date, we have not had difficulty in recruiting. There are difficulties in some areas, such as substitution, as the Deputy noted correctly, but we have also made some changes to make it easier for teachers to get permanency and to develop posts for promotion. Part of the negotiations that we successfully concluded with the unions will make teaching more attractive and we hope we can meet the need even in these more difficult areas where there are particular subject problems.

The difficulties identified by the Teaching Council were not those of inactivity by the Department. They were the sheer difficulty of forecasting things such as migration, subject choices, the choices which might be made by people with, for example, a degree in physics, how many of them might choose to go into education, and how a reliable forecasting model might be developed for that. The council recognises that these are very difficult issues for which to find a satisfactory forecasting model which is why this work will take some time.

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