Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

They will decide. When a school loses a teacher, the school does not necessarily close. The teacher does not lose his or her job, and this is why we had the debate on deployment. We need, however, to ascertain how we can achieve the delivery of a quality primary education system in parts of the country where the populations have changed, for reasons we all understand. We must determine how we can maintain standards and use new methods of communication and transport. We must examine what other countries are doing in this regard.

In the next six to eight weeks, we will have the value-for-money report on small schools. It covers just under 600 schools, each with a student population of 50 or fewer. Much work is being done on it. We might have an informed debate when it is published.

On the changes that are to take place, if they do take place, I am told nine out of ten schools will not be affected by the measures next September. There is an appeal process for small schools. When they receive their allocations of teachers in the coming three or four weeks, they will then be able to appeal to the Department specifying how the allocations affect them. There are precedents such that one can say the potential student population in a given area is greater than the Department is estimating. We can now verify that. As I stated on another occasion in this House, the Department has an electronic geographical information system that tracks the child benefit payment, both by age and location, right across the country. We can, as a consequence, determine the potential demand for education. It would not make sense, knowing what is likely to happen over the next three or four years, to make an intervention based on a dip in a given year that would cause the kind of disruption in question.

These are matters we will examine, but we cannot ignore facts on the ground. These facts are that the population is changing in some areas and that we must respond to that change.