Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased that the Minister for Education and Skills is here in person to take this Topical Issue, which concerns the shortfall in the school capitation grant for primary schools. The Minister is very aware of the situation. The capitation grant used to be €200 and was cut to €170 some time ago leaving a very serious shortfall in the funding for our primary schools throughout the country. With the increased expenditure in the past couple of years, one would have expected that there would have been some move to restore it to the previous level. It is very disappointing that there has been no such improvement in the two budgets to date despite a commitment that this would happen in the programme for Government.

As we all know, there are over 500,000 children in well over 3,000 primary schools around the country. I do not think there is any match between the capitation grant and the cost of running the school. It has resulted in schools having to provide in the order of €50 million through fundraising and other efforts just to keep the school open in terms of light, heat, electricity and insurance and to make it a safe place for the students to learn in and for teachers to teach in. Many people have contacted us about this issue. I believe that in the forthcoming budget, the Minister must start a process of restoring this grant as much as possible as quickly as possible. I will deal with other issues relevant to primary education such as class sizes, leadership, the situation of teaching principals, teacher supply panels and above all, ending the pay inequality that is still rampant in the primary school sector during my second opportunity to speak. My primary issue is to raise capitation grants for small schools with the Minister. It is more severe in small schools where the cost of keeping the building up and running to a safe standard is an enormous burden at local level. I ask the Minister to address this by way of a significant increase in the forthcoming budget.

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