Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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126. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills his plans to continue or amend the employment control framework, ECF, currently in place for higher education institutions; if he will consider a phased withdrawal of the ECF to ease the restriction on staffing in higher education institutions; if he will ensure that arts humanities departments have the same capacity to recruit academic staff as science technology engineering and maths departments in any amendment of the ECF; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [32576/16]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform announced in Budget 2015 that the public sector recruitment moratorium established in 2009 would end, but that recruitment across the public sector would continue to be managed in a targeted and focused way. In this regard, a Delegated Sanction Agreement (DSA) was put in place for Government Departments and agencies. The specific Employment Control Framework (ECF) which has been in place for the higher education sector since the introduction of the moratorium and which provided institutions with considerable flexibility to fill vacancies through recruitment or promotions on the basis of meeting an overall ceiling of posts, will be replaced by a DSA specific to the higher education sector. It is expected that the DSA will be in place shortly.

In recognition of the increase in the number of students that will be attending higher education institutions over the next number of years, the DSA will allow institutions the same flexibility to fill vacancies but will also allow them to grow their core staff numbers in line with their resultant increased income.

A condition of the current ECF, and one that will continue under the DSA, is that core staffing levels should be achieved in a balanced manner across the grading structure and should not be concentrated at either the lower or higher grade levels or at either academic or non-academic grades i.e. the framework should not result in 'grade-drift' within institutions. There is no restraints with regard to staffing levels in any particular departments within an institution. As autonomous bodies institutions are responsible for managing the staffing levels within their departments in line with the conditions of the ECF/DSA and HR practices generally.