Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Minister said in her opening remarks that the pupil-teacher ratio has been reduced in recent years. That is true, but the point is that it has not been reduced nearly enough. We have 100,000 students in classes of more than 30 according to the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, INTO. We have a pupil-teacher ratio of 25:1 in primary school when the European equivalent is 20:1. Teaching takes place in bigger classrooms in Europe. Here, the largest classroom size is 49 sq. m and there may be a few in recent years of 55 sq. m. It is not uncommon in Europe to have a classroom size of 100 sq. m. It is no surprise that the Teachers Union of Ireland says that even 1 m social distancing cannot be achieved in some schools. We need a pupil-teacher ratio of 15:1 and to achieve that we need to up the ante with spending on prefabs for the schools and then school buildings as soon as possible after that.

Teachers suffering from heart failure, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, cancer, obesity and weak immune systems are being instructed by Medmark to go and teach in classes. Medmark says they are high risk but not very high risk. The World Health Organization makes no such distinction. There should be no such distinction in terms of health and safety for teachers going back to work.

I have a number of final points. The leaving certificate class of 2021 has not yet been mentioned in the debate but changes have been introduced to the course to give students more choice. I register my opinion now that these changes do not go far enough or take sufficient account of the loss of direct and face-to-face teaching time these students have suffered. There is a particular issue with oral examinations, as for three months over the end of last year, people did not have the face-to-face assistance with oral preparation. The oral examinations should be scrapped and the Department must go further in making changes for this year's course.

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