Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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382. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of applications currently with the emergency works grant scheme as of 15 October; and the value of those works within the applications, in tabular form. [43129/24]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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The purpose of the Emergency Works Scheme (EWS) is to provide funding specifically for unforeseen emergencies, or to provide funding to facilitate inclusion and access for pupils with special needs. It does so by ensuring the availability of funding for urgent works to those schools that are in need of resources as a result of an emergency situation.

An emergency is deemed to be a situation which poses an immediate risk to health, life, property or the environment, which is sudden, unforeseen and requires immediate action, and in the case of a school, if not corrected would prevent the school or part thereof from opening.

The EWS is intended to remedy an emergency situation and usually provides only an interim measure until a permanent solution can be delivered and, as such, the EWS operates on the basis of a minimal scope works.

Due to the nature of the EWS, the EWS team endeavours to are deal with applications in an expedited manner. However, given the devolved nature of the EWS and the number of stages at which approval and further correspondence are required it is not practical to provide an accurate number of applications currently within the EWS as these would all be at varying stages of progression.

However, in order to be of assistance to the Deputy, the EWS team has summarised the current level of application 'awaiting assessment' on the EWS system. This refers to applications that have either not yet been assessed or have been assessed by the admin team and further information is being sought before these projects are sent for technical review or approved. Due to the nature of the EWS and its criteria. schools often fail to provide all the necessary information in the initial application (such as an accurate costing estimate) and this requires the admin team to request further information. In instances such as these the application is still deemed to be awaiting assessment although in most cases the EWS team has corresponded with the school in question and the application is progressing.

Currently my Department has 192 applications awaiting assessment on the EWS system. It is not feasible to provide a value of works for these 192 applications as the values provided by the schools in the schools initial application is an estimated costing that is rarely in line with the minimal scope of works criteria on which the EWS operates. As a result, in practice, the scope of works and associated cost of works that gets approved by the EWS is usually significantly less than the costs sought in the schools initial application. The value of these 192 applications as presented in the schools initial application totals in the region of €385m but this cost is anticipated to be reduced significantly before approval.

Finally, it should be noted that the number of EWS applications received in 2024 is likely to exceed 1,250 applications for 2024 and the level of applications awaiting assessment may not all refer to the year 2024 as some schools may not avail of EWS funding that is applied for and/or reply to requests for further information which skews the statistics.