Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if he will clarify, if a teacher is not registered with the Teaching Council then under existing legislation, if his Department is obliged to pay for their services from September onwards. [38222/12]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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It has been the policy of my Department for some time that only qualified and registered teachers should be employed by schools. This is set out most recently in Circular 31/2011. Current recruitment procedures direct schools to ensure that teachers proposed for appointment to publicly paid posts must be registered with the Teaching Council and have qualifications appropriate to the sector and suitable to the post for which they are proposed.

Only where an employer can satisfactorily demonstrate that every reasonable effort has been made to recruit an appropriately qualified and registered teacher, may an unqualified or unregistered person be recruited pending the recruitment of an appropriately qualified and registered teacher. This provision must be inserted into 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. An unregistered person employed pending recruitment of an appropriately qualified and registered teacher at any point after September 2010 should have no expectation of continued employment beyond the period of time that it takes the school to source a registered teacher.

Where a registered teacher allows their registration to lapse, or an unregistered person is employed in a teaching post in a recognised school then, following commencement of section 30 of the Teaching Council Act 2001, that person may not be paid out of monies provided by the Oireachtas beyond the very limited specific circumstances to be set down in Ministerial Regulations. Until section 30 of the Teaching Council Act is commenced, the Department or a VEC is not prohibited from paying an unregistered person recruited in accordance with the published procedures. It is the intention of the Minister to commence section 30 during the 2012/2013 school year.