Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to raise the serious challenges that principals in primary and secondary schools are facing with the allocation of the ancillary services grant. Since I raised this issue locally, I have been taken aback by the volume of correspondence I have received from primary and secondary school principals in my constituency but also right around the country. There is a very serious issue regarding the ancillary services grant in terms of covering the services of caretakers. I will quote from some of the correspondence I received from one primary school principal. These are the kinds of representations made to me by school principals:

Ancillary services funding was in place to pay for secretaries and caretakers. In the past two months however we were astonished to be told by the department that we would receive absolutely no funding to pay for ancillary services. The department's explanation is that under the old model we were spending all our ancillary services funding on a secretary and as they now are covering the cost, we are entitled to nothing to pay for a caretaker.

To describe this as a farcical situation would be an understatement. The principal also goes on to note that he specifically sought advice from the Department of Education on how the school is expected to pay for the cutting of hedges, the cutting of grass, the maintenance issues, and the safety and other issues in terms of the infrastructure of the school if the school receives no funding to pay for these services. He also stated the following:

From my interactions with the department on this issue, it is clear to me that they are determined to stand firm on the issue and simply hold the attitude that however a school has coped to date, they will just have to get on with it and do what they are doing. In our case if we were using parental contributions, fund-raising and relying on tradesmen working for free, well then we should continue doing that.

I am sure the Tánaiste will acknowledge that it is entirely inappropriate for the Department to give with one hand while relentlessly clawing back with the other hand. I have established through a parliamentary question response that the annual total for the ancillary grant funding has fallen from €96 million in 2019 to €83 million in 2023. This makes a mockery of what I take as the Minister's sincere wish for schools not to continually resort to parental contributions merely to enable a school to maintain itself as a safe environment. I ask the Tánaiste to urgently review and reverse the current situation whereby schools are seeing the value of ancillary grants fall. This deficit is the value of the salary paid to grant-funded secretaries. It is grossly misleading to champion progress on the secretaries' pay issue while concealing the fact that this progress is being achieved on the back of a major reduction in other areas that schools simply cannot do without, such as caretaking services.

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