Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As someone who attended a small school where we only had three classrooms, I cannot stress the benefit and need for us to prioritise supporting our small schools and doing everything we can to retain them.

What we have provided in the programme for Government is a very clear commitment to provide measures to support small schools, including introducing a new national small schools project and trialling those new administrative supports the Deputy has mentioned. There is an established project, which brings together small schools in local clusters, enabling them to collaborate, identify common challenges and trial innovative solutions.

There are 26 small schools in the cluster in counties Galway, Donegal, Kerry, Wicklow and Waterford, consisting of between three and five schools per cluster. The feedback from schools has been extremely positive and this is reflected in the interim evaluation report. We want to make sure our small schools recognise the important role they play in our communities. They need to be retained and supported. We must ensure the staff, teachers and pupils benefit from that clustering and pooling together of resources, whether that is administrative support, sharing ideas or training. We can already see the positive feedback from the pilot work in the clusters that have been developed.

It is my intention to roll out that programme to ensure we can work with even more schools and provide for them, recognising the important role they play in our communities the length and breadth of this country. We must support them in their leadership and teaching roles and ensure our students above all also benefit from this.

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