Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Ceann Comhairle for agreeing to put this issue on the agenda and the Minister for Education and Skills for coming to the House to discuss it. Yesterday there was an announcement from the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, in regard to the issue of allowances in the public sector. He rowed back on previous commitments to find savings of €75 million this year and €150 million next year in allowances in the public sector pay bill. However, despite the Minister bottling it on those commitments - undoubtedly some allowances are from a different era - he had no problem targeting those who have yet to enter the public service and who are not in a position to stand up for themselves.

I speak in particular about new entrants to teaching. Yesterday the Minister announced that new entrants will not be entitled to the €4,500 qualification allowance which was an acknowledgment of higher education achievements and higher qualifications among entrants into teaching and to ensure we had a very highly qualified teaching team.

How does the Minister plan to operate an education system which will need 3,000 new teachers at primary level in the coming years to deal with population growth? How will he operate a system which pays these 3,000 teachers salaries which are far lower than what their colleagues receive? What assessment has he done on the impact it will have on the education system and how will he ensure highly qualified individuals will continue to become teachers in this country?

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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This review of allowances is seven months late and we have not been given an opportunity in the Dáil to debate the issues arising even though we were promised a debate on them. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform has looked into his heart, de Valera style, and made this decision in secrecy. Despite extensive commentary on the matter there is very little concrete financial information in the public domain in terms of a breakdown of the allowances into individualised costings and, critically, who receives them and in what grades. In the absence of that information and a full debate in the Dáil, we will not have a full and fair decision-making process.

I have raised the issue of teachers because the Minister, Deputy Howlin, has been especially vindictive towards new entrants to the teaching profession. A young teacher who is lucky enough to start his or her career this month will earn just over €27,000, which is almost €12,000 less than a teacher recruited in 2010. Decisions that target the profession of teaching make no sense on any level. They will clearly dissuade the best and brightest from entering the profession, and for a Government which claims it will base economic regeneration on the education sector and a knowledge society, it is clearly not taking a joined-up approach in deliberately punishing young teachers in this manner.

The Minister for Education and Skills and his colleagues have repeated ad nauseam they are the ones for the tough decisions. As the Minister with a duty of care for teachers in the system and the new entrants who will join the profession, I challenge him to take the tough decision of deploying clause 1.28 of the Croke Park agreement for the specific task of addressing the issue of high pay in the public sector. It is a small proportion of the service but none the less almost 7,000 people earn salaries of more than €100,000. If he is prepared for tough decisions, he should address that issue but he should not allow his Cabinet colleague to attack and undermine the teaching profession and, by extension, the quality of education offered to our children and young people.

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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This is a poor direction for the Government to take. The decision that new teachers will earn 20% less than teachers who started in 2010 will have a disproportionate impact on new entrants to the profession and will create a two-tier system in our schools. A new teacher who starts on a salary of approximately €30,000 after training for four years could earn more by pushing a wheelbarrow on a building site. The Minister for Expenditure and Reform has stated that business cases for the retention of payments were submitted on more than 800 of the 1,100 allowances notified to his Department. Perhaps he should consider the social and educational investment in the future of our children in addition to these business cases. Considerable social benefit can be gained from investing in education and, in the context of our current difficulties, most people would agree that education must be our top priority.

The decision will also have enormous consequences in terms of attracting individuals to the profession. Given our increasing population and the importance of providing a high quality education system, it is imperative we attract the best candidates. The teaching profession has been an easy target in recent years. The salaries paid in 2007 and 2008 appeared inflated but the salaries our teachers now receive compare favourably with their counterparts in other OECD countries. It is not the case that they are dramatically overpaid and the job has become more difficult over the years. Discipline is an increasing challenge and we will pay a high price in the future if we do not attract the best people.

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Yesterday the Government approved a number of measures relating to public service allowances for new beneficiaries. This follows a public service review of allowances and premium payments conducted by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. The main measure impacting teachers is the withdrawal of qualification allowances for new entrant teachers.

The Government has decided that the payment of allowances for the basic qualifications required for entry to the teaching profession is no longer appropriate or necessary. This allowance goes back many years to the time when a distinction was made between teaching colleges and university qualifications. It is not considered justifiable to incur a permanent cost to the public service pay and pensions bill where a public servant acquires an additional qualification. The payment of allowances, such as the Gaeltacht and island allowances, are being withdrawn or altered for all new beneficiaries in the public service, including new teachers. These allowances are no longer considered the most appropriate way to meet the business needs of public service employers or the service delivery needs of Irish language speakers. Other allowances were withdrawn because they were no longer considered appropriate or necessary, such as the allowance for principals who act as secretaries to the boards of management of their schools and the allowances for principals of certain community schools for management roles in sports complexes.

The view put forward by this Department, which was accepted by the Government, was that allowances held by serving staff are clearly part of pay and simply to withdraw them in the case of serving teachers would be a breach of the Croke Park agreement. Accordingly, the impact of the measures in so far as they apply to teachers will he confined to new entrants only.

The Government was mindful of the impact of the abolition of the qualifications allowance on new teachers given that the allowances have come to be viewed as an element of basic pay. We therefore sought to ensure broad consistency of impact across sectors. In this context, it has been agreed that new entrant teachers will no longer receive qualification allowances but will start on a salary of €30,702, which is equivalent to the fourth point of the existing scale. They will also have the option of being paid a pensionable allowance of €1,592 for supervision and substitution, thereby bringing their starting salary to €32,294.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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I asked the Minister to explain how he proposes to manage a teaching workforce which is paid according to two different salary scales. New entrants will be paid at one scale while those who started as recently as 18 months ago will earn much more. A new entrant in 2010 could have received as much as €39,000, but salaries for new entrants have decreased to €32,000 this year when the supervision allowance is included.

The 2011 OECD report, Education at a Glance, showed that in Ireland, those in the teaching profession earn 12% less than their colleagues with similar educational experience in other sectors. That issue already exists within the workforce. By withdrawing a system where there is recognition of higher qualifications and of the highly skilled and trained people coming into the education system and encouragement of that, the Minister is setting up a system in which it will be more difficult to attract the top level graduates we need. He is also damaging morale in a workforce where new entrants must work next to colleagues who may be earning 25% more than them although their experience and qualifications are similar. Will the Minister address that issue and say how intends to manage it?

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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Notwithstanding the crumbs from his table for new entrant teachers, the Minister seems pretty nonplussed by this issue. He seems to accept that he will have a two-tier workforce in the education system and that a variety of allowances - I have not seen the individual figures - will be taken from support for Gaeilge and the Gaeltacht. The Minister needs to reconsider that. I am alarmed by the fact that he seems terribly laid back about this.

The Minister and the Government use the Croke Park agreement most cynically. I understand why many public servants see the agreement as the last line of defence. Government after Government has hammered them and there has been a haemorrhaging from the public service. I understand their attachment to the agreement. What I cannot stomach is the Government using the Croke Park agreement, on the one hand as an excuse to hammer new entrants into the civil and public service and, on the other, as a shield to protect itself from taking the tough decision to deal with the issue of high pay. We would not have to have this conversation about new entrant teachers or others in the public service who are on modest levels of pay if the Minister and the Cabinet had the bottle, the cop-on and the decency to deal with the issue of very high pay in the upper echelons of the public service. That is the fair thing to do. It is also the thing to which the public would most enthusiastically respond. What we want is fairness. It is not fair to target new entrants and new teachers in this manner.

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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It is said one should never waste a good recession. In this recession, a wedge has been driven between the private and public sectors. The recession was caused by the private sector, including people in my own business, but the public sector has been made a scapegoat for it. I still employ more than 50 people in the private sector and every time pay is cut to low paid public sector workers I see how it affects my business. Cutting the low paid in the public sector impacts dramatically on the private sector. Low paid workers spend all their money. They do not put it away in banks because they need every penny to live. The Government needs to think differently about this issue.

The media have helped to drive the wedge between the private and public sectors. The public sector has been demonised. More than 60% of public sector employees earn less than €50,000. I agree with cutting the inflated wages of those who are overpaid, but the bulk of public servants are not madly paid. Hitting them is hitting the domestic economy which has enough problems of its own at present.

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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I thank the Deputies for their supplementary comments.

I have to find €77 million in savings, as Deputy McConalogue will be aware since we discussed this matter earlier today in the Joint Committee on Education and Social Protection, to meet the targets set for us in the memorandum of understanding to which this Republic was committed by the previous Administration.

There are no easy answers to this matter. We looked in great detail at the allowances for teachers. There is not the same kind of career structure in the public service as in the Civil Service, where those in various grades are paid a salary with increments and, upon promotion, are paid an additional salary with increments but also have new responsibilities. The allowances in the education system are extra money for doing extra tasks. Deputies have the figures for the new starting salary for entrant teachers.

We looked at the Croke Park agreement and got advice on it. The advice was that unilaterally to change the salaries of people in higher levels, or across the teaching spectrum, would be a breach of the agreement. We want to negotiate a new agreement. We would bring to that new agreement the issue the Deputies have raised, which is the discrepancy between the starting salaries of new teachers and of those who started two or three years previously.

This is not unique to the public sector. Those young people who are lucky enough to get jobs in the private sector are getting those jobs at reduced salaries. Deputy Wallace may testify to this from his knowledge of the private sector. Starting salaries are now much lower for people doing, effectively, the same work with the same organisations. One may say the public sector has a higher moral responsibility than the private sector. Prices have fallen, we must regain our competitiveness as an exporting nation and salary costs across the entire system are part of that.

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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Then why not cut salaries at the top?

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Section 30 of the Teaching Council Act 2001 will be commenced later this year and will probably apply with full effect in the new year. A condition of that is that every teacher who gets paid from the public purse - some 76,000 and virtually all the teachers in the country - will have to be registered with the Teaching Council. To maintain their registration each year, they will have to do continual professional development, as is the case for doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Incentivising people to do further courses, which is a legacy going back as much as 50 years, has been replaced by an obligation on teachers, as on all professionals, to keep their professional competences up to date. It should not require the kind of incentivisation that has existed and is a legacy from the past that we do not need.

In a year and a half or less, I hope there will be a new public sector agreement on pay and conditions. The issues to which Deputies referred will be part of that. We could not touch the existing agreement without provoking a confrontation. We explored that and we got very clear messages. It took a long time. The most reluctant signatories to the Croke Park agreement were the ASTI, TUI and IFUT. One teaching union had to vote twice to get agreement to it. Informed with that information, we had to make the choices we did.

I feel neither complacent not smug about those choices. I am fully aware of their potential impact, over time, on the teaching profession. I am not a professional educationalist, but all the evidence from different education systems are ad idem on the assertion that the key factor in any education system, primary and post-primary, is the quality of the teacher. Good teachers produce good outcomes, irrespective of many of the other things. I am conscious of the potential impact down the road, when I hope we will have a different kind of agreement that will enable us to do some of the things to which the Deputies refer.