Aindrias Moynihan (Cork North-West, Fianna Fail)
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1014. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of teaching posts that remain unfilled in Cork primary and post-primary schools in the 2024-2025 school year, by subject and school type, in tabular form; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [40955/25]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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This Government is committed to ensuring that every child has a positive school experience, with access to qualified and engaged teachers who are dedicated to supporting their learning.

Like many sectors, recruitment challenges exist in the education sector, especially in urban areas. While most teaching positions are filled, some schools face significant recruitment challenges.

The recruitment and appointment of teachers for teaching positions is managed by individual school authorities. There are over 3,700 individual school authorities, responsible for this process, including boards of management at primary and post-primary schools, as well as Education and Training Boards (ETBs).

Given that school authorities manage recruitment independently, my Department does not collate data from individual schools on unused allocated posts or subjects with unfilled posts. A recent analysis of the teacher payroll shows that, as of March 2025, there were 8,551.4 teachers employed across primary and post-primary schools in County Cork out of an allocation of 8,782.8 full time equivalents (FTEs). This resulted in 231.4 unused allocated posts during the 2024/25 school year with 137.7 unused allocated posts in primary and 93.8 unused allocated posts in post-primary.

This analysis has been taken at a point in time of the relevant data, and schools continually recruit throughout the year. This payroll data from March 2025 for County Cork is summarised in the following table:

Measures introduced in recent budgets include a STEM bursary, a PME fee refund scheme and an expansion of upskilling programmes, which are in addition to workforce planning for teachers and SNAs These reflect a commitment to ongoing investment in the education system.

Teacher supply measures introduced have led to:

• an increase of 20% in Initial Teacher Education graduates (student teachers) between 2018 and 2023, and a 30% increase in the number registered with the Teaching Council since 2017, and
• between 2018/19 and the last school year 2023/24, through record investment by Government, the number of teaching posts has increased by 10,408 with 5,339 (14.3%) primary, and 5,069 (17.8%) post-primary allocated teaching posts.