Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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63. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the steps he will take to tackle the growing use of prefabricated classrooms in schools. [22420/18]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I wish to advise the Deputy that in the context of a rapidly increasing school population, my Department's priority is to ensure that every child will have access to a physical school place and in this regard, it is sometimes necessary to make use of temporary accommodation in order to meet the accommodation needs of schools.

It is my Department’s intention to replace such temporary accommodation, including purchased accommodation, with permanent buildings, where the need is established in the context of the long-term accommodation needs of each individual school, over the lifetime of my Department's 6 Year Capital Programme. Such accommodation will be replaced as part as part of major building projects completed under the Department’s construction programmes and also under my Department’s additional accommodation scheme. An additional funding provision of €180 million is being made available from 2019 for this initiative.

In the vast majority of cases the use of prefabs is to provide short-term accommodation when a new teacher is approved, and we have successfully recruited 5,000 extra teachers in the last 2 years.