Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome Deputy Keogh. The report was published last January following a series of sessions of the education committee with children's rights groups, students, teachers' unions and student unions. Many of the recommendations centre around providing additional funding to schools for Covid safety measures and to allow students to catch up on missed time when schools were closed in 2020. The report predated the additional school closures from January to March 2021.

Many vulnerable students fell behind while school buildings were closed. The report shows that some 4,500 children did not return to school when it reopened following Covid closures last year. There is no doubt that contained within this number are vulnerable students who may have become disengaged through those closures. The Covid learning support scheme the Minister mentioned is welcome but Sinn Féin believes it does not go far enough to ensure children who are at risk of becoming disengaged are supported and included. It would be naive to believe that the regression can be reversed with an additional week or two of tuition in the summer or a small number of additional teaching hours through the class scheme, although I acknowledge it will undoubtedly be beneficial.

We have an underfunded and overcrowded education system, with the highest class sizes in the EU and one in every five primary school children in a class of over 30. This overcrowding continues at similar levels in post-primary education. Valuable summer programmes and temporary increase in teaching hours will not prove adequate unless backed up by ongoing investment. Without a drastic reduction in class sizes across the state, our children will continue to miss out. Without a corresponding increase in set allocations in our schools, summer provision alone will never achieve the aim of fully supporting children with special educational needs.Without an increase in funding for school completion and home school community liaison programmes, many vulnerable children may be at risk of becoming disengaged from education entirely. Significant long-term investment in these areas will be crucial to ensuring a generation of children do not lose their education to this pandemic. The main causes Sinn Féin have made and which we included in our alternative budget in 2022 were: to provide hot meals to all children attending DEIS primary schools; a comprehensive review of special education teacher, SET, provision, beginning with a 4% increase in SET allocation, or 554 additional special education teachers, and the recruitment of 100 additional home school community liaison co-ordinators; and to increase investment in the school completion programme.

Another issue mentioned in this report is putting air monitors in schools by the end of December 2021. Many schools are still waiting for HEPA air filtration. Sinn Féin has been calling for this as far back as Christmas 2020. On 13 December, the Minister announced that schools would be receiving additional minor works grant funding which they could use to purchase HEPA filtration devices. However, couching HEPA in terms of minor work grants has added massively to the workload of school leaders. It puts HEPA - we have long known that Covid is airborne - in competition with other essential projects within the school, for example, fixing a leak or a broken window. Some principals have used this funding not for HEPA but to meet the additional heating costs in the school due to windows being kept open, which is causing conflicts among teachers and school leadership about where this money would be best spent.

For those who choose to purchase HEPA filters, the scientific jargon in the guidance documents to principals is like another language. The Department could have provided access to expert advice which stated in plain English what they needed to buy and where they could buy it. We continue to call on the Minister to procure centrally and distribute these devices.

Another key recommendation was reform of the leaving certificate. I raised the call by students for a choice in the leaving certificate for 2022 between calculated grades and written examinations. The ISSU has called on the Minister to put in place a hybrid leaving certificate model this year. In a survey of more than 40,000 students, 68% of leaving certificate students said they wanted the hybrid leaving certificate. Leaving certificate students have made it clear they need a choice. The Minister cannot ignore the voices of students in this regard. I will leave it there. The reality is the level of disruption varies greatly from student to student based in the most part on factors entirely outside of their control. Some students may not have missed any class with their teacher while others may have missed weeks. The only way to ensure fairness in terms of the class of 2022 is to give students a choice between written examinations and calculated grades.