Dan Neville (Limerick West, Fine Gael)
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Question 391: To ask the Minister for Education and Science her plans for reducing class sizes in the next academic year for the 4,400 primary students in Limerick City and County who are in classes of 30 or more. [21812/06]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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As the Deputy will be aware, major improvements have been made in primary school staffing in recent years. Next September there will no less than 4000 extra teachers in our primary schools, compared with 2002. Not only is the average class size in our primary schools down to 24, but there is now one teacher for 17 pupils at primary level, including resource teachers etc.

Children with special needs and those from disadvantaged areas are getting more support than ever before to help them to make the most of their time at school. Indeed, with the thousands of extra primary teachers hired by this Government, recent years have seen the largest expansion in teacher numbers since the expansion of free education. Over the next two school years even more teachers will be put in place both for the above priority areas of disadvantage and special education and also under a reduction in the mainstream staffing schedule.

As you know all schools are staffed on a general rule of at least one classroom teacher for every 29 children. Of course, schools with only one or two teachers have much lower staffing ratios than that — with two teachers for just 12 pupils in some cases and so on — but the general rule is that there is at least one classroom teacher for every 29 children in the school. Next year this is being reduced to 28 children per classroom teacher and in 2007/2008 it will be reduced to 27 children per classroom teacher.

A further initiative that has been of direct benefit to primary schools, including schools in Limerick, has been the change in the criteria for developing schools. For the current school year the threshold for getting a developing school post was reduced specifically to help schools that are seeing large increases in enrolments each year. 170 such posts have been sanctioned in the 2005/06 school year, compared to 105 in 2004/05. So, as I have pointed out the general rule in the current school year is that at least one classroom teacher is provided for every 29 pupils. Furthermore, the actual average class size nationally is 23.9.

Nonetheless, some schools do have classes with more than 30 children in them. However, as the Deputy will be aware from previous replies, the number of children in Limerick in classes of 30 or more has been dramatically reduced in both Limerick city and county, and indeed has been almost halved in the county under this Government.

This progress is also reflected at a national level, where the number of children in classes of 30 or more has steadily decreased in recent years. However, what really puts the decrease in large classes under this Government in context is the fact that in 1996/97 five times more children were in classes of 35+ and ten times more children were in classes of 40+.

It is important to appreciate that there are a number of different reasons why a particular school may have a large class in a given year. Reasons why there are large classes include a significant fluctuation in enrolments from one year to the next and/or a decision by the school principal not to have multi-grade classes.

Regardless of the reason why there is a large class in a particular school one year, it should be noted that in the majority of cases this is not the situation in the following year. In the main, the same schools do not have large classes year after year and so the same children are not in large classes year after year.

Where some classes in a school have class sizes of greater than 29, it is often because a decision has been taken at local level to use their teaching resources to have smaller numbers in other classes. Indeed, I often find that when I look into why a particular school has a class of 35 in a particular grade, the answer is because there is another class in the same school with a much lower than average number of pupils in it.

I appreciate that splitting classes may not always be an option for a particular school, because for example there might be a large group in junior infants and a small group in sixth class and so on. But where it is possible, I believe that principals should consider the benefits of having smaller multi-grade classes as against having large differences in class sizes at different levels in the school.

This Government has clearly demonstrated its commitment to improving staffing in our primary schools by hiring thousands of extra teachers in recent years and we will continue to make progress on this issue.