Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The Department will be writing to the boards of management setting out the position on untrained teachers. It is important that children are taught by fully qualified teachers, particularly as more are now available.

I will shortly be publishing a new framework on tackling educational disadvantage. Millions of euro are spent on tackling disadvantage. It is to the credit of any Government to recognise schemes that are not working, to decide not to proceed with them and introduce new schemes and approaches. Members always point out that schools originally labelled disadvantaged no longer fall into that category, while schools never so labelled are. Rather than criticising the measure, I would have thought the Senators opposite would have welcomed the continued progress in this area.