Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Last week, a number of teachers in the audiovisual room spelled out to us in great detail the situation with primary school funding. All of us across every constituency are very aware of this. We deal with schools up and down the country that are in dire circumstances, particularly in the area of special needs education. We have waiting lists there and families trying to find a classroom or a space. Usually, when they find that space in a school that is providing the service, the school is a long distance from them and they cannot get a place in a school close to them. Then, over many years, we find children being crisscrossed over and back across the country because their parents cannot find the service in their localities. Adequate funding and planning need to be put in place. One of the issues the teachers raised very strongly was that the POD system is not being used to identify at an early stage children who would need these additional services and that the Department is simply refusing to allow that to happen. What we have here is a crisis in a sector where there should not be a crisis and where we can see in advance where the problems will be and how they can be alleviated and sorted out.

One of the situations I am very conscious of - Deputy Clarke mentioned it earlier - relates to the school books grant, which was issued last year. It was not enough that time and now the Department has cut it back even further. It is ridiculous that children are getting this grant to get the schoolbooks but it does not meet the needs.

An issue several schools have raised with me is that we have families here from Ukraine and other countries who are in a school and are moved, not by their choice, to a different town or a different area. When they go from there and arrive in the next school, another school books grant has to be found for them and it does not exist because it has not been there at the beginning of the year. There are a whole range of issues where there is an absence of flexibility and, at the core of it all, an absence of adequate funding to ensure that we provide proper education facilities for all our children, whether they are children with special needs or children in mainstream classrooms. There needs to be recognition that this is not just a problem in isolation but a problem that is widespread across the country and requires adequate funding.

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