Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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It is the policy of my Department that only qualified personnel should be employed by schools. Unqualified personnel should not be appointed except in exceptional circumstances and then only when all avenues for recruiting qualified personnel have been exhausted and only for quite limited time periods.

This policy is reflected in Circular 40/2010 which my Department issued earlier this year. Under its terms, schools are directed to ensure that teachers proposed for appointment to publicly paid teaching posts are registered with the Teaching Council and have qualifications appropriate to the sector and suitable to the post for which they are proposed. Where an employer can satisfactorily demonstrate that every reasonable effort has been made to recruit an appropriately qualified and registered teacher, an unqualified and/or unregistered person may be recruited pending the recruitment of an appropriately qualified and registered teacher and this provision must be inserted in the employment contract. The employer must repeat the process to recruit an appropriately qualified and registered teacher within the period of any such contract and in any event within the school year.

The amendment to section 30 of the Teaching Council Act, which is contained in the recently published Education (Amendment) Bill, provides for the regulation of exceptional and limited situations in which unregistered people will be permitted to be paid from public moneys.