Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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318. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if she will provide a list of the categories of public sector workers and civil servants under her Department whose contracts fall under the Croke Park Agreement; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [60732/22]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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The Public Service Agreement 2010-2014 or "Croke Park Agreement" was reached with ICTU as well as Gardaí and Defence Force Associations and applied across the public service. The agreement introduced measures and reforms which applied to all public service bodies and staff. In addition, it contained a specific chapter on measures in the education sector.

In terms of teachers, the main measure of 33 additional hours a year at post primary and 36 hours at primary were introduced (known as CPA hours). A central purpose of the CPA hours is to provide for certain essential activities such as staff meetings, parent-teacher meetings, school planning, subject planning and mandated Continuous Professional Development to take place without reducing tuition time. Before the CPA hours were introduced, these activities ate into tuition time. This meant that schools closed for full days or half days in order to carry them out, causing interruption to tuition and significant inconvenience for parents, as well as childcare costs – particularly for primary parents. While the Department and school authorities view the use of these hours as vital in providing delivery of education the specific use of the hours has been reviewed and amended in agreement with teacher unions over time. 

The CPA also considered the use of existing contract hours for Special Needs Assistants, but no additional hours were required under these mechanisms for SNA’s; rather, a redistribution of a small portion of existing hours was undertaken to best support schools. 

Staff in the (then) VEC sector committed to co-operation with the restructuring and rationalisation of the VEC sector and also to implement the redeployment measure introduced across the wider public sector.

Measures also applied to certain grades in Third Level Education, but that sector now falls under the responsibility of my colleague, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.