Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)

This Government is fully committed to ensuring that every child has a positive school experience with access to qualified and engaged teachers who are completely dedicated and committed to supporting their learning. It is fair to say that we have a fantastic cohort of teachers who are committed to just that.

Over 97% of allocated teaching posts are filled and the number of unfilled allocated posts in DEIS or rural schools is comparable to that in all other schools. The data, which is based on our payroll, is not suggesting that there is a massive discrepancy between DEIS, rural schools or any other area. We have a rate of 97% of posts filled.

As with other sectors of the economy, recruitment challenges exist, which I acknowledge. In particular in certain parts of the country, most notably Dublin, there are still challenges. To address these, several targeted measures that have been implemented have led to an increase of 20% in initial teacher education graduates between 2018 and 2023, an increase of over 30% in the number of teachers registered with the Teaching Council between 2017 and 2025, and an increase in allocated teaching posts of 11,752 between the 2018-19 and 2024-25 school years. There are more qualified teachers than ever. The increase in the number of allocated teaching posts has outpaced population increases, with over 79,000 teachers now employed in our schools. We are continuously looking at our data and how that matches what was reflected in the demand in our schools.

Teaching is a highly attractive profession. We still have strong demand for teacher education programmes, with 3,600 newly qualified teachers registered in 2025 alone. With the changes to the overall public sector pay agreement, I believe we have competitive salaries compared with other jurisdictions.

To address some of the challenges, and perhaps I will come to this in my second contribution, one of the first things that I said as Minister I wanted to do was determine how we make sure that we encourage more teachers into the system, how we keep the teachers we have and how we make sure we are supporting them in the best way possible.

See this speech in context