Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I want to see principals of small schools getting resources. The vast majority of principal teachers have full-time class responsibility. They are now being lumped with a significant additional workload on the basis of this legislation. I want that to be recognised through the allocation of the necessary additional resources for this purpose. The same applies to class teachers and schools in general.

This could be the start of a bright new future but the operation of the educational plan must be done in a fair and open way. A great deal of recognition is given to parents, which nobody would argue against, but the position of teachers has been somewhat diminished in the Bill. If one goes through the issues relating to the goals of the educational plan, they are all specifically professionally oriented. There are decisions on which parents should certainly be consulted and in which they should be involved, but these decisions can only be made by professionals, either teachers, psychologists or various other people. The role of parents is to establish the need, describe the problems and indicate how they can be part of the solution. It is important that they be involved and I would not suggest that it should be otherwise.

The educational plan is core to this matter and must be specific. Resources must be made available. I will believe it when I see it. The reason I say this is that section 13 was not necessary unless somebody had bad thoughts about making the money available. If section 13 were removed we could all hold hands and sing "ring a ring a rosie", hail the bright new future and the solving of the problem and walk out of here. However, I do not suspect the Government will be prepared to drop section 13 and leave it to section 9(7), which requires that funding be made available.

I wish the Bill well and will be supporting it in the main, although I intend to table some amendments.