Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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291. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills to set down the number of persons who have left the public service in his Department in each of the past five years to date, either by way of natural retirement or redundancy; the extent to which the national pay bill has been affected as a result; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [13622/16]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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My Department operates payrolls for teachers serving in primary, secondary, community and comprehensive schools and for certain non-teaching staff. It also operates a payroll for payment of pension to retired school staff. The number of teachers and other school staff who retired on pension in the years from January 2011 to December 2015 total 7,000 approximately. The cost of lump sum gratuity payments made to the retiring staff in that period totals circa €691 million. A breakdown by calendar year of the number of retirees and the gratuity costs is set out in Table 1.

There are in excess of 26,000 retired teachers and other retired school staff in receipt of pension from my Department. Expenditure on pension is of the order of €3.4 billion for the above categories for the 5 year period. A yearly breakdown is set out in Table 2. It is not possible to readily dis-aggregate the separate pension cost of those who retired in each of the last 5 years. However the average gross annual pension is of the order of €30,750.

Table 3 sets out the number and value of Redundancy payments made by my Department to teachers and special needs assistants in the period 2011 to 2015.

Teacher and special needs assistant vacancies that arise in schools due to retirements or otherwise are one of the few areas of the public service that have been exempted from the Government's moratorium on recruitment. Resultant vacancies continue to be filled in the normal way. In addition and notwithstanding budgetary pressures, teacher numbers are increasing due to the on-going and significant increases in demographics at primary and post-primary level. Budget 2016 provided for an additional 2,260 teaching posts for the 2016/17 school year.

The Statistics Section of my Department's website contains extensive data relating to schools at primary and post-primary level, including the number of teaching posts allocated to schools. The most recent published information relates to the 2014/2015 school year. Data in relation to the 2015/16 school year will be published later in the current school year.

TABLE 1 - School Staff - Retirement numbers and cost of gratuities - 2011-2015

TABLE 2 Expenditure on Pensions paid to school staff who retired from Primary, Voluntary Secondary, Community and Comprehensive Schools - 2011 to 2015