John Halligan (Waterford, Independent)
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10. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills his plans to address the serious issue of large class sizes within the education system; his views on whether the current pupil-teacher ratio is far in excess of where it needs to be in order to provide a comprehensive education to our young students; the way our pupil-teacher ratio compares with other EU member states; if he will make a firm commitment to reduce the ratio over the coming years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [23359/14]

Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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The Government's focus in recent years has been on operating a budgetary programme that is designed to return the Government finances to a sustainable basis. This has helped Ireland to return to a position where we are seeing some economic growth. It is a continuing improvement in our economic growth that will enable us to move to a point in future budgets where we can look again at providing for additional teacher resources in schools which could bring about an improvement in PTR and class size.

It is important to point out that within the schools sector we know from international research that while class sizes is a factor the quality of teaching is a far more significant factor in determining outcomes. In terms of international comparison, the last published statistics by the OECD show Ireland's PTR at slightly above the OECD average and average class size at primary level at 23.9 compared to an OECD average of 21.3.