Batt O'Keeffe (Cork North West, Fianna Fail)

When I became Minister for Education and Science I saw there was a plethora of grant schemes. I saw also the Comptroller and Auditor General's report that said the Minister should be more focused in the way grants are allocated. It was suggested that one grant system for a school would be more appropriate as that would remove the bureaucracy in the school and in the Department. However, the priority in one school may be different to the priority in another school. Now the schools have discretion as to where they focus. In order to sustain that system I put in place an additional €20 million this year for capitation in order to allow schools to designate the areas of greatest need as they saw it.

I encourage schools to set up book loan schemes to ensure that children with difficulties have access to a school books. The area of class size was mentioned. The Government has provided 15,000 extra teachers in the past ten years, 7,000 of whom were allocated to the primary sector in 2002. I took up office in May and, in July, the Government found that the tax take would fall short by €3 billion. We took an action in July and the Government said it would not interfere with teachers or SNAs and we did not do so. However, the difficulty was when we returned in September, we were €6 billion short. My budget breaks down as 80% for teacher and SNA pay and pensions and 20% for everything else. I had no choice. The Government requested a 3% overall budget reduction in each Department, and a 3% cutback on the 20% portion of my budget represented a 12% reduction. I could not go back in there again and if I applied the 3% reduction to the teacher allocation, I would have taken 2,500 teachers out of the system. The system could not take that and I did not favour that. I examined the most appropriate avenue that would not interfere with the learning outcome and that would have the least impact on the number of teachers taken out of the system. I will be proved right when the teaching allocations are sent out later this year that the net impact will be 200 teachers taken out at primary level and 200 at second level.

The quality of the teacher is more important than the number of pupils in the classroom.