Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth. This Commencement matter is for the attention of the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, and it relates to providing an update on school capacity reviews in County Galway, including Ballinasloe. It is crucial that we provide an update on school capacity across the country because this is the data the Department of Education uses to identify whether school places are needed for children or whether we need new schools or new classrooms. That is the system that is used, and the Minister of State would be very familiar, I think, with geographical information systems in any case, given his background. It is crucial that we see these capacity reviews completed at an early stage. They are done only once a year. I would have queries as to why this cannot be a live document and a live update, with schools coming back with data on an ongoing basis. Surely that could be managed. Currently, it is a point in time, once a year, when schools are requested to complete a survey from the Department of Education. They indicate their capacity. That is then uploaded onto this geographical information system, ArcGIS, which is the system that is used.

My question is on the current status of the updates to that system is for County Galway, in particular in Ballinasloe. This is used along with school planning areas, which the Minister of State spoke about, across the country. We have 315 or 316 areas, from what I understand, and the schools then look at capacity in these areas. There are, however, lots of crisis areas in the country at the moment when it comes to primary school places, and we need to see how this data can be used at an early stage, now, in order that we can then plan for the budget, whether it is school transport, additional classes or a new school. Is it needed now for September? We should work with the teams in the Department of Education to do that because the only options we have are to try to look at existing capacity within a school, deliver new classrooms or look at a new school. Those are the three options we have in front of us.

This system is also used by the regional education and language teams, REALTs, in the education and training boards, ETBs, to identify school places for children of families coming from abroad, from many countries, including Ukraine, who come to Ireland, who need refuge and who set up here. They cannot find space, and it is a challenge to get space in schools. I am speaking specifically about the Ballinasloe area. The Minister of State with responsibility for special education and inclusion, Deputy Madigan, only recently visited Ballinasloe. I have worked hard on projects over the past year where we had two classrooms open up in Creagh National School, a school of nearly 440 students. That is at capacity. The children were outside of the school trying to use every available space before they could move into these school classrooms. The same goes for St. Teresa's Special School. It was really good to see the new special classes opening up in Ardscoil Mhuire and Corbally college as well.

There are huge issues, however. We have over 1,000 children at primary school level and another 1,000 students at post-primary level. These children are struggling in terms of young families moving to the town and finding a place for their children. We have allocation of over 100 new housing units in Ballinasloe, which is wonderful. We will have families moving into new homes, local authority housing in Ballinasloe. Those families will have a lot of demands. By the nature of this, they will have more demands in probably having younger families. They will also have more demands when it comes to GP visit cards because, as regards the median income now, people are being allocated these GP cards.

When we look at Ballinasloe and the Pobal deprivation index and the level of deprivation, we see that there are areas in Ballinasloe that are -55 on the index. What is the plan of the Department of Education for children to go to schools? We have a DEIS level 1 school in Ballinasloe that caters for the whole county of Galway and the surrounding counties: Westmeath, Roscommon, Offaly and north Tipperary. When families do not have the transport to get children from the town 5 km out to a smaller school outside it, will we have school transport in place? Will a new school be put in place? I have spoken to three principals of those schools, including a Gaelscoil, which can cater to so many children, but, again, there are challenges when it comes to English as an additional language, EAL, supports. Also, will we have challenges when we have no space to put in additional classrooms?