Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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Question 144: To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the changes he will make to criteria governing the appointment of posts in the home school community liaison scheme and the clarifications that are being made to vacant HSCL posts that are to be filled in the forthcoming school year. [14334/11]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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The current provision of Home School Community Liaison (HSCL) services will remain in the 200 post-primary and 345 urban primary schools participating in DEIS.

The process of allocating teaching resources to schools for the 2011/12 school year and the arrangements for filling vacant or new teaching positions takes place in the context of the Programme for National Recovery, the EU/IMF Programme of Support for Ireland and the Public Service Agreement 2010-2014. It is necessary for my Department to exercise additional control and reporting measures this year to ensure that the number of teachers employed in schools is consistent with those programmes.

Schools can only fill their vacancies from the surplus permanent and CID holding teachers. It is not possible to permit schools to fill vacancies in any other manner until the surplus permanent teachers are redeployed.

Schools with HSCL co-ordinator vacancies were requested to hold off making new appointments. Although HSCL co-ordinator appointments are made internally from among the staff of schools, the filling of the replacement post for the teacher deployed to undertake HSCL duties may have implications with regard to panel arrangements.

Given that there are currently 248 surplus permanent and CID holding teachers remaining on panels, my Department will not decide until 10 June 2011 (at the earliest) on giving schools authority to commence recruitment in any other manner. My Department may decide at that stage to prioritise schools that have fully co-operated with the redeployment process.

Discussions with the relevant education partners also include devising whatever additional arrangements are necessary to facilitate the redeployment of any remaining permanent and CID holding teachers (including 21 surplus permanent teachers that do not currently have access to a redeployment panel).