Seán Haughey (Dublin North Central, Fianna Fail)

I am taking this matter on behalf of the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Batt O'Keeffe, and I thank the Senator for raising it.

The 2009 budget required difficult choices to be made across all areas of public expenditure. These decisions were made to control public expenditure and to ensure sustainability in the long run. In this respect, education, while protected to a much greater extent than most other areas of public expenditure, could not be totally spared. The various impacts at school level were included in the budget day announcements. Even with the budget measures in place, there will still be a significantly increased borrowing requirement in 2009.

The Minister fully accepts these decisions are not of themselves desirable and that they can only be justified by the imperative of securing the future economic stability of the country. The Minister has called for co-operation from all the education partners in meeting the challenges facing us both as an education community and as a country.

The staffing schedule for the 2009-10 school year, primary circular 0002/2009, has been published on my Department's website at www.education.ie and my officials have written to all schools to notify them in this regard. The schedule is a transparent and clear way to ensure schools are treated consistently and fairly and know where they stand. Under a system that allocates additional teachers at different step points under a common schedule, it is a fact of life that one single pupil change in enrolment can cause a school to lose or gain a teacher. In recent years, when improvements were being made to the staffing schedule, it was also the case that there were winners and losers depending on individual enrolment profiles. If the staffing schedule was changed to allow the schools that are due to lose a teacher to retain that teaching post, the Minister would be treating them differently from other schools with the exact same number on the rolls and he does not propose to do so.

The Minister has a responsibility to ensure that whatever the overall level of allocation, the system for allocating teachers to schools is transparent and fair where everyone knows where they stand and each school knows it is getting the same number of mainstream class teachers as the school up the road with similar enrolment. The system should not create anomalies or operate on the basis that one or more schools should be treated differently to others.

The allocation process includes appellate mechanisms under which schools can appeal against the allocation due to them under the staffing schedule. The final allocation to a school is also a function of the operation of the redeployment panels which provide for the retention of a teacher in an existing school if a new post is not available within the agreed terms of the scheme. I thank the Senator for providing me with the opportunity to address the House on this matter and to outline the current position.