Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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127. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if her attention has been drawn to school principals across Dublin that are reporting teachers leaving because they cannot afford to live in Dublin, and the severe difficulty in recruiting new teachers for the same reason; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [49999/22]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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I fully appreciate the concerns of teachers and indeed society generally in relation to increases in living costs.

The Government acknowledges that current price pressures present particular challenges and are a source of concern for all public service workers, including teachers. While the issue of pay alone will not resolve these issues, the Government is committed to the delivery of quality public services, and will continue to approach public service pay in a balanced way that is reasonable and fair to both public servants and the taxpayer. There is an important balance to be struck between maintaining industrial peace and protecting the Exchequer.

The value of public pay deals to the Government and the taxpayer is ensuring that pay costs are managed in a sustainable and orderly way and in a climate of industrial peace. By and large public pay agreements have delivered on these objectives over the last 12 years. Following the conclusion of discussions on 30 August, the parties to Building Momentum, with the expert assistance of the WRC who oversaw the talks' process, have come forward with a set of proposals, to extend the terms of Building Momentum to 31 December 2023. These proposals have now been ratified by public service unions and associations representing the public service workforce. In addition to the 1% increase due in October 2022 under Building Momentum, the extension of the agreement will provide for a further increase of 6½ % over the lifetime of the agreement. The starting salary for a new entrant teacher in 2012 was €30,702. This will rise to over €41,000 under the extended agreement. Overall, teachers will see increases from €3,200 to €5,600 under the extension of the agreement.

In recent years my Department has established a comprehensive programme of work to support the supply of teachers at both post-primary and primary levels, including the introduction of new programmes of initial teacher education and teacher upskilling programmes in targeted subject areas and the Teaching Transforms campaign, which encourages young people to follow a career in teaching.

I have allocated significant additional posts to the primary substitute teacher supply panels in areas where significant challenges in sourcing substitution continue, bringing the total to 610 posts on 151 panels, covering approximately 2,800 schools, including 29 base schools covering the Dublin area.

The supply panels work alongside the existing methods of sourcing substitute teachers, such as Sub Seeker, the national substitution portal service operated by the Irish Primary Principals' Network and schools can also make local arrangements to have their own regular substitutes to call on if needed.

The Teaching Council is also currently processing applications for registration from newly qualified teachers, who will represent a new source of supply in 2022/23. In excess of 3,400 primary and post-primary NQTs are registered to date with almost 40 further applications currently in progress.