Eoghan Murphy (Dublin South East, Fine Gael)
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To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if he has considered the possible merging of information systems to create one access point for information such as lists of schools, pupil numbers, teachers' salaries and grant payments. [50685/12]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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My Department has been dependent for many years on IT systems to provide a range of services to its customers, including schools and school employees. A number of systems have been developed over the past two decades, leading to disparate data stores. In an effort to address this issue, my Department's IT Unit has already taken steps to implement a technical solution to allow designated users a single access point for information regarding schools, pupils, school employee/pensioner pay details and grant payments. The Business Intelligence tool acquired has the capacity to merge information from many different data stores and provides users with interactive dashboards, analysis and reporting functionality, and capacity to run ad-hoc queries. This tool has been implemented for designated staff in the Inspectorate, Statistics Section and Post-Primary Division of my Department, using primary census returns data and aggregate post-primary pupil data. The current phase is focussing on the inclusion of school employee payroll data for my Department's Payroll Division.