Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael)
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99. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if her Department would consider developing a mechanism for sharing historic employment records for the purposes of pension eligibility with the Department of Social Protection; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [25179/23]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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My Department currently provides historic employment records to school employees paid by the Schools Payroll Division on formal request. If these records are readily available from computerised payroll records, a report is issued to the employee within a number of days. In the case of older paper historic payroll records that have to be retrieved from archives there may be a delay involved while the records are retrieved from off-site storage and checked before issue.

The Payroll Division of my Department has not been approached by the Department of Social Protection to consider alternative arrangements in relation to employment records for the purposes of state pension eligibility. Any such arrangement would require compliance with data protection legislation on the sharing of personal information.

My Department is open to exploring how the transfer of such information to the Department of Social Protection could be facilitated in accordance with data protection requirements.

Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael)
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100. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if her Department is considering modernising the storage of historic employment records for ease of retrieval; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [25180/23]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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The payroll systems used by my Department's Payroll Division maintain payroll records for teachers and other schools staff in readily retrievable format for the vast majority of schools staff. Staff from my Department regularly issue payroll records derived from these computerised system.

As the Deputy may be aware, schools remain the employers of teachers and schools staff and the Payroll Division of my Department acts as paymaster on behalf of the school authorities.

For a relatively limited number of teachers who were initially employed and paid directly by schools and prior to the computerisation of payroll records, my Department has some payroll records in various formats including paper format and microfiche. In some cases given the age of the records they have been archived and are stored off site.

At present there are no plans to capture this small number of older historic payroll records in digital format.