Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the sixth class boys and girls and their teachers from my national school in Belclare in Galway. They are welcome to this great House. I thank Belle Keating for organising the trip with me. It is appropriate that national schools are present when we are discussing funding primary schools. I thank Deputy Harkin and her team for tabling this motion.

The Minister of State appeared before the Joint Committee on Disability Matters yesterday. I spoke to the principal of Belclare National School before entering the Chamber. The school is supplying July provision, but the capitation per pupil has been cut by 25%. The money has gone to pay the teachers, but the scheme is not working right in terms of providing the children the school services they need. For €15 a head, the Minister of State might reconsider the matter. It is not a large amount of money at all.

On the question of how we fund primary schools, their running costs have increased somewhat, particularly in terms of heating, lighting and meeting all the new regulations that go with those. The Government accepts this, as it has been making one-off payments to schools, but we need to recognise that primary schools are being left behind, as their capitation grant has not been increased for the past 13 years. They are €145 per student behind secondary schools. A primary school has to do everything that is needed to ensure it is run to the highest standards and that everything is right in the school, but many schools that had reserves built up to pay for the niceties they would have liked to get are now using those reserves to pay for ordinary maintenance, insurance, heating, lighting, ventilation, etc.

It is important to say that the job of a school principal has changed considerably over the years. The management of a school and the paperwork and regulations that go with it have created significant challenges for principals. The reinstatement of the assistant school principal role should be done urgently. It was cut during the time of austerity. From what we hear, austerity is well gone now and we have billions of euro in surplus every year thanks to the taxes we raise. It is important that we immediately consider the reinstatement of the assistant principal position in national schools. Much of the work that a principal does has nothing to do with teaching, but with the management of everything else. I look at how Belclare National School has developed since I was there. I will not say when. It has developed since it was built as a four-classroom school in 1956. It now provides education for more than 300 students per annum. There are 50 students present today who will be going into secondary school, so it is doing the job right, as is every other primary school in the area and across the country. According to an OECD report, we are spending 10% less on the provision of primary education than other developed nations. Such education is fundamental and we as a national pride ourselves on providing the best education to everyone. It is an asset for this country. When foreign direct investors are looking at places to locate, we see the benefit of it. Let us not just rest on our laurels and say that the schools will take care of themselves. It is important that we meet demand by providing additional funding.

In terms of capital expenditure, I would like to discuss issues affecting a number of schools in my area, including the amalgamation of the three primary schools in Tuam to form the Trinity Primary School. It formed approximately three years ago with the expectation that a new building would be delivered as quickly as possible.

They are still at design development stage. The process by which these projects are brought to fruition is long-winded. The system has been set up to slow down the pace of spending money rather than speeding it up. The same applies to the Gaelscoil campus in Athenry, where both the national and secondary school are in dire need of a new school, as is the amalgamated boys' and girls' school in Athenry.

A number of other schools are painfully going through the process of building out their campuses. However, it takes a decade to get a school built once a plan is incepted. That is way too long and there is no need for it but a process has been put in place with all kinds of approvals, from appointing a design team to approving tender analysis, approving planning permission and so on. It has become a circus of approvals with much more money now spent on consultants and reports than is necessary. The idea of approval processes was to make sure we got value for money, but we have brought the processes to a stage where we do not get value for money. As well as that, we are delaying the process of construction. In light of the current level of construction inflation, if you pause, it will cost you. When you plan something and do not build it for six or seven years, you can be sure the price will have doubled or increased even more.

Coming from a construction background, I get frustrated that much of this paperwork was created to slow things down. We have built an industry out of it. It is something we have to look at for the school building programme and across all public construction. We are grinding it to the extent that we are not building what we should be and are spending a great deal of the money we have set out for the projects on consultants' reports and paperwork and all kinds of approvals that are not necessary. We employ people in local authorities to produce the reports and employ people in the Department of Education to do the same thing when we should be taking a commonsense approach.

As one Deputy said, we should trust that whatever schools are doing - they are doing it right - and work with schools to deliver the infrastructure they require. National schools are our pride and joy in this country and rural national schools are a beacon of light in rural Ireland. We need to ensure that primary schools are funded to the level they need in order that they can maintain standards.

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