Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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571. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the status of the planned extension for a national school (details supplied); and if she will make a statement on the matter. [54772/22]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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I wish to advise the Deputy that there is no current application on hand from the school authority in question. I can confirm that an application for additional accommodation was received in 2021 under my Department's Additional Schools Accommodation (ASA) scheme. Following assessment of the application the school was advised that they had sufficient accommodation for their staffing cohort.

The purpose of the ASA scheme is to ensure that essential mainstream classroom and Special Education Needs (SEN) accommodation is available to cater for pupils enrolled each year, where the need cannot be met by the school’s existing accommodation.

At primary level, this situation generally arises to cater for a school’s accommodation requirements where an additional teaching post has been sanctioned by Teacher Allocation Section, or a new SEN class has been sanctioned by the NCSE, and all available alternative accommodation within the school is already being used for classroom purposes.