Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome. I congratulate her on her elevation. First things first. I have in front of me two series of questions that were sent to her Department, the first on 20 August and the second on 9 September. To date, I have not received answers in respect of any of them. They were raised on behalf of parents, principals, boards of management and teachers and it is not good enough that I was not able to get answers in time. Having said that, I offer the Minister my congratulations on getting the leaving certificate results delivered. College places are now beginning to be sorted out. I am aware that some court cases are currently in progress but, ultimately, the Minister - and her predecessor - managed to do something we would have thought impossible not terribly long ago.

The first issue that needs to be addressed is that relating to the occupational health company, Medmark, which looks after our teachers. It is not acceptable that a teacher who is referred to Medmark because of an underlying condition gets a letter stating that he or she is suffering from a high-risk illness but that it is not a very high-risk illness - without defining the difference between the two - and then passing it to the board of management to decide whether he or she should be taken back into his or her school. If the teacher is not taken back into the school, he or she is told to go to his or her GP. The latter will put the person on sick leave and, under sick pay rules, he or she will be taken off the payroll, as the Minister and I both know, within a six-month period. That is not good enough.

The second issue I wish to raise relates to the wearing of masks by children in secondary schools. Some children, particularly those with disabilities - including learning disabilities - are simply not suited to wearing masks. We have to have an alternative. We also have to have a situation where those children who are wearing masks for the full day at school get breaks out of the school to give them a chance to take off their masks during the day. Some children cannot wear face masks and we have to include a proviso that they can wear visors or something else.

Children who suffer from learning disabilities such as dyslexia or any of the other conditions who cannot tolerate a situation where they cannot see someone's face are not able to avail of one-to-one teaching because they cannot move through their schools. We have to find a solution to that also. Parents are contacting me about children with various disabilities who should have individual learning programmes set up for them but who do not have individual learning and are forced to sit in classes in which they have no interest. As a teacher, the Minister will know that it is detrimental to their learning to have them sit in on classes in which they are not interested. I cannot understand how we expect children to engage in physical education while wearing masks.

We have the situation where a child in a school presents with a high temperature, the principal takes all the necessary steps to put the child into isolation, the child is sent home and subsequently diagnosed with Covid-19.Two different stories are coming out, one from the Department of Education and Skills and one from the HSE. Should all the siblings be sent home at the same time as the child? The HSE says "Yes"; the Department of Education and Skills says "No". That is my information at the moment, unless the position has changed. What about the children who rely on school transport to get to and from school? How do we get them home? Do we ask principals to put themselves at risk and drive them home? That is simply not good enough.

Senator Higgins mentioned homeschooling and schooling for children whose parents have underlying conditions or they themselves have underlying conditions. Why is the Minister expecting the schools to lay on e-learning or blended learning systems for those children? Teachers have enough to do already. Why will the Department not set up a learning portal for each of the national school and secondary school subjects, and allow students to do what they did during the initial lockdown when RTÉ laid on classes and have classes laid on? It only takes one teacher to be able to deal with an e-learning portal for the entire country in first class in national school, with another for second class, another teacher for third class, etc. Instead of expecting schools to do the job that should be done on a national level, we must start looking after the children themselves and living up to our responsibility to deliver an educational process.

If a child is sent home on a Friday, the diagnosis may not be confirmed until the Monday or Tuesday of the following week. Is that fair to the teachers involved? Should teachers not be immediately told that this child has been sent home or has been kept home because they are a suspected Covid-19 case?

I have many other things I would like to say. I am quite happy to give the Minister the four or five pages of questions I have submitted to the Department and which have remained unanswered in order to try to get answers for those people who asked the questions of me. It is simply not good enough. While a great job has been done on Covid-19, all Ministers need to speak with one voice, giving the same answers to the same questions.