Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein)
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275. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the spending per funding heading in national and primary schools, per county, for 2022 and to date in 2023, in tabular form. [25708/23]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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As funding from my Department is not allocated or recorded on a county basis, I am therefore not in a position to readily provide details on the amounts paid to schools at a county level over the period, as requested by the Deputy.

As the Deputy will be aware, my Department is voted over €10bn in the annual REV for 2023. This represents a substantial investment in our education system and in our children and young people and is an increase of c.€700m on the REV for 2022. In the school year 2022/2023, over 558,000 students enrolled in primary schools and over 406,400 in Post Primary schools with funding allocated across the following high-level headings: Pay and Pension (c.80%), Capital Projects (c.10%), Financial Grants to Schools (c.6%), providing School Transport (c.3%) and other current expenditure (c.1%).

In the 2023 budget, funds were secured to provide free primary schools books to c.558,000 students. In addition, funding was secured to provide over 900 additional teachers, including 370 primary teachers to further decrease class sizes by reducing the school staffing schedules by 1 point for all primary schools, along with additional teachers supporting students with special educational needs. Further to this c.1,000 additional special need assistant posts were funded to bring the total in the education system to over 20,000. There is also continued investment and delivery across the school building programme to support the operation of the school system.