Joe O'Toole (Independent)

——who told me that this week they lost their access to the educational psychological service. That is a reality.

There is no reference in the amendment to the recent report from the National Council for Special Education, which outlined the way the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act was to be implemented. I intend to refer regularly to that aspect in my contribution. That report gave a time-line set of objectives for the implementation of that Act. The report was given to the Minister three months ago. Implementation of the Act requires a great deal of money but that is not happening.

The issue for me is class size. I ask my colleagues to accept this point. Trying to deal with class sizes of more than 30 for those 110,000 pupils is an undermining of the curriculum. It cannot be done. I am not trying to gild it and I know that the Senators opposite will not disagree with this point. On average 10%, 3 pupils, would have a learning difficulty and would need some form of remediation. Perhaps two would have some form of special need. More than likely the class would have one or two newcomers. The focus of the Department of Education and Science at the moment is to ensure that as far as possible children with special needs are educated in those classes also. That is impossible and it is why the excessively large classes do not work. We all supported the inclusion proposal when discussing the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act. However, it cannot work in classes of that size, which is why we need a maximum class size.

When we last discussed education here Senator Minihan made substantial and important points about teacher efficiency. He made the point that teachers who are not efficient in their job should be found out, on which I support him. Children only get one chance and they deserve the best, which is why they also deserve not to be in classes of 30 or more. Large classes damage all children in the system and not just the ones I mentioned.

My problem with the Government amendment is that it reflects emotional blackmail. The Minister is claiming that although the Government was going to do one thing, it is now doing something else instead. It was going to reduce class sizes but it has decided to look after children with special needs and disadvantage instead. This is at the same time as the same Minister has told us all — and was cheered to the echo for doing so — that there would be additional supports for special education and disadvantage which we all welcomed. Nobody knew at that point that a solemn commitment and promise given to reduce class sizes as outlined in the programme for Government would now be ignored, which is causing chaos.

While I am not sure about Senator Minihan, Senators Fitzgerald and Ormonde will certainly recall back as far as 1987 when Fianna Fáil returned to Government and owing to a huge problem with money it increased class sizes at the time. It approached the education partners but there was war. At the end we all sat down and came to a conclusion. For the past 20 years solemn agreements have been hammered out with school managements, teachers, education partners and the Department of Education and Science every year. It has rarely been satisfactory for anybody. I have negotiated most of it myself.

I was rarely happy leaving those negotiations but we stuck by our agreements. It used to stick in my craw every week to hear questions in the other House being asked as to why an additional teacher could not be sent to a particular school. The reply always stated that because of an agreement with the INTO, the extra teacher could not be sanctioned. We got blamed every time and I needed to defend it for 20 years. I do not take lightly that a solemn agreement entered into has been unilaterally broken. It is a breach of trust and confidence that is utterly unacceptable.

As I said last week it was cheap and nasty to try to deflect attention from this debate by referring to the quality of those leaving teacher-training colleges, some of whom never got to become teachers anyway. I made my points on that subject last week. I am uncomfortable with the final point in the Fine Gael motion that "a change in leadership at the Department of Education and Science is long overdue". I have considerable confidence in the people running the Department of Education and Science and they are not here to defend themselves. I do not know whether that was the point Senator Ulick Burke intended and I can talk to him about it at some stage.

The other significant and serious points need to be addressed and should have been addressed by the other side in the course of the debate. Considerable work remains to be done in primary education. A survey during the week showed that most schools have inadequate access to physical education, which is a problem. The percentage of schools on the west coast is appalling.