Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I thank Senator Brian Hayes for raising this matter again. I am aware he has a personal interest in it. Everybody in education has an interest in this area because one of the features of the changing face of our schools is the profile of the school, the languages spoken in the school, the backgrounds of the students and the colour in the schools, which makes them very different places to visit than perhaps they would have been in the past. That creates new challenges for schools and for me, as Minister for Education and Science. It is a policy that must be constantly changed and updated because of the degree to which the situation is changing.

It is interesting to note that in the current school year, the Department of Education and Science provided 541 language support teachers at primary level and 261 at second level. That is approximately 800 teachers whose sole job is to teach English to students for whom English is not their first language. That alone cost €46 million, although I know Senator Brian Hayes is not questioning the commitment to providing the resources and giving support but it certainly reflects the number of non-English speaking students in the school.

The number of non-English speaking students in a school is not the same as the number of non-nationals in a school because many of them may have fluent English and would not require this service. It is broken down in two ways. Schools with 14 or more qualifying pupils get an additional full-time, temporary teacher, 28 get two or more and, depending on the circumstances, a third post may be allocated. Schools with a huge proportion of qualifying pupils have got extra teachers. Primary schools who have between three and 13 non-English speaking pupils receive grant assistance of €6,348.69, however they worked out that figure, while schools with between nine and 13 such pupils receive grant assistance of €9,523. A total of 425 primary schools will get support under that scheme this year, which means that a huge number of schools throughout the country are benefiting from this.

Sometimes we tend to think that this support is concentrated in the larger urban areas, and particularly in Dublin. Where there are fewer than 14 non-national pupils with significant English language difficulties, additional teaching hours ranging from three hours per week in respect of one such pupil to 19.5 in respect of 13 pupils are sanctioned. An allocation of two years' language support for each pupil is provided in my Department.

On Tuesday I launched a report on reading levels in our schools. The reading standard continues to be very high but one point raised was that non-national students who have a poor reading and literacy rate in first class had caught up by fifth class, which is a tribute to the schools and the teachers. That sells its own message in terms of the language and the financial support that is going with it, but it is also more than that because all teachers have a role in supporting students to acquire the necessary language skills in the context of each subject being taught. The purpose of the language support is to acquire sufficient language skills to enable students engage with the curriculum rather than to develop a particular level of competence in the English language. Specific language support provision is intended to complement other support provided such as resource teachers, learning support and other ex-quota posts.

Having spoken with the principals and teachers involved in this area, they say that while there may be an issue about the teaching of the language in the school, there is a bigger difficulty in that English is not spoken by the parents in the home. There is a need for more support for those parents in the language. We are trying to look at it in the broader context to determine how the children can be supported outside the school by way of their families getting support also.

Teachers are provided with in-service training through Integrate Ireland Language and Training Limited, which provides training seminars for language support teachers, part-time or whole-time, along with classroom materials including the European language portfolio, to assist them in meeting the English language needs of their pupils-students. It also develops classroom materials in partnership with practising classroom teachers. Grant supports to provide training and resources for teachers and language tuition for refugees is currently of the order of €1.4 million, making a total of €47.5 million. A further additional resource is available to teachers in the form of guidelines on teaching English as an additional language. These guidelines are available on the NCCA website.

A comprehensive mix of supports has been put in place by the Government to ensure that the increasing number of non-English speaking students in our schools get all the extra help they need but we are conscious of the schools that have a large proportion of non-English speaking students. We have been getting information on that and the Department has been meeting with some of those schools to determine the extra supports they need which, as they have identified, are not all in the language teaching area. It may be a case of having to look at the broader context in terms of the family, etc. We will work on that to ensure that the investment we are making is getting the right results and giving the correct supports to those schools but it is under immediate and ongoing review to ensure the schools get the help they need.