Seán Kyne (Galway West, Fine Gael)
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237. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if he will outline the reasons his Department has decided not to re-evaluate the base school status of schools this year; if his attention has been drawn to the fact that this decision is negatively affecting certain schools (details supplied) in County Galway. [33485/13]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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Some 85% of all NCSE approved resource teaching hours in the 2012/13 school year were allocated to schools that had resource base posts. There are some slight changes to the location of these base posts for the 2013/14 school year to further improve the efficiency of these arrangements. The schools that were affected by these changes were those where the posts were not fully utilised for NCSE approved resource hours or where the teacher in the post was predominantly based in a neighbouring school. The full criteria used is set out in the Department's Staffing Circular 0013/2013 and is available on the Department website.Base schools are required to co-operate with their neighbouring schools to ensure that any surplus capacity in the (25 hour) resource posts is made available to neighbouring schools to meet their NCSE approved resource hour requirements. If the surplus capacity is fully utilised there are standard arrangements in place for the relevant schools to contact the Department for part-time resource teaching posts.