Deputy Michael Higgins has asked permission to raise on the Adjournment the subject matter of the composition, terms of reference, procedures, criteria for the evaluation and time scale for submissions and decisions of the Quota Review Committee for Primary Education. May I suggest that the Deputy has 14 minutes to make his case and the Minister eight minutes to reply. Is that satisfactory?
Adjournment Debate. - Quota Review Committee for Primary Education.
I would never question your arithmetic, a Cheann Comhairle.I thank you for the opportunity to return to the topic, in a way, of the implications of Circular 20/87 on the primary education sector. My purpose in raising the issue of the quota review committee announced by the Minister for Education when we were discussing primary education in the Dáil and the general review of primary education that she announced after a Fianna Fáil Parliamentary Party meeting on 24 November is to provide the Dáil and the Minister with an opportunity for clarification.
These announcements by the Minister, both inside and outside the Dáil, have sown more confusion, distress and uncertainty than they have resolved. In so far as I have a very limited amount of time, I should like to state what I have to say in the form of some simple questions to the Minister which I hope she will answer because they are questions which the public would like to have answered. My first question to her is this: Why, when she was issuing invitations to participate in the Quota Review Committee, did she not issue an invitation to parents to be directly involved, or to the National Parents' Council? After her announcement was made publicly she stated on television in answer to a question put by Olivia O'Leary that a representative of the Catholic School Managers Association represented parents, that in so far as parents were represented on boards of management, they were represented. She then went on to name an individual. As it happened the individual the Minister named was not a parent with a child in primary school at present. This must have caused embarrassment to the person concerned as he is not a member of a school management board as a representative of parents but rather as a representative of a patron on the board. The Minister's logic simply does not stand up because if she says that people could have a secondary type of representation, that teachers are on management boards, I might remind her that she found it necessary to issue an invitation to the INTO to be directly involved in the Quota Review Committee, an invitation which they, quite understandably, for reasons which I have made clear, rejected. The Minister was gratuitously insulting to parents and their national representative association, the National Parents Council, in her summary on this point.
We are now faced with two reviews. What will be the terms of reference of the general review of education in the primary sector? It did not even merit one completed sentence in her press release of 26 November. In the first half of the first sentence of that press release she announced that such a review would take place and then used the rest of the circular to announce how she would like the Quota Review Committee to work.
We must ask some questions immediately.What will be the terms of reference of the general review? Turning now to the Minister's second review which will be carried out by the Quota Review Committee I would like her to tell us what is the present status of circular 20/87? Will the review committee she speaks about recommend, for example, the status quo in primary education? Did she seriously think that she would secure the compliance and the collusion of the INTO in the implementation of circular 20/87? Was that not the true meaning of the invitation she extended to them?
She extended an invitation to them to participate in the Quota Review Committee though circular 20/87 was still being implemented. Of course, the INTO saw through the Minister's camouflage and last Friday at their executive meeting in Bundoran decided, as reported in the press the following morning, that their campaign against the implementation of circular 20/87 would continue, that they would participate in a general review of the primary sector but did not want to have anything to do with the Quota Review Committee. They also decided that they would oppose increases in class sizes. Equally they felt anger at the denigration of parents by the structure of the Minister's invitation to participate in the Quota Review Committee.
The Ministers statement of 26 November merits clarification in this House for another reason. In her statement she stated that in order to give the review committee an adequate opportunity to carry out a thorough examination, no changes under circular 20/87 will take place before the end of the school year, June 1988, but what does this mean? A teacher at a school in Swords, County Dublin, whose roll number is available for supply to the Minister, received a letter the following morning from the Department of Education. It was headed "Reminder to Chairman of Board of Management and Teachers" and stated that they were being informed that the average enrolment of pupils in their school for each of the three quarters for the period ended 30 September 1987 failed to reach the minimum of 570 units required for the continuance of normal recognition to a teacher whose name was supplied and who was the fifteenth assistant in the school. It went on to place the individual on the panel. Further inquiries to the Department of Education have confirmed that the Department were implementing circular 20/87.
Indeed, confusion arises as a result of the nice three card trick the Minister is seeking to play with Circular 20/87 —"now you see it, now you don't," but we know the joker is in the pack. The fact of the matter is that the Minister will be suppressing posts in education as and from January. It is equally clear that the Minister has never estimated correctly the number of posts to be suppressed. She began with a figure of 1,300. Last week her Department confirmed the figure for the number of posts to be suppressed by 1 January as being 1,650 with another 150 to 250 being suppressed by next June and an unestimated figure to be suppressed from June to the end of the year. She is moving perilously close to the figure of 2,100 which was the figure she rejected as the INTO survey figure and which is the figure she instructed her representatives in the Fianna Fáil Party to reject around the country.
As late as this afternoon two schools, the CBS in Tralee and another in Kilbride, County Meath, both of which figured in the press release of Senator O'Toole this evening, who is the campaign organiser for the INTO, were refused permission to go ahead with appointments planned for 1 January. I ask the Minister to tell the truth, to answer the following questions. Will the names of the teachers already placed on the panel be withdrawn? Can they be considered to be withdrawn in the light of her statement, made publicly, that the circular was not to take effect until June 1988? Will the post already planned and approved for 1 January go ahead despite the implications of the circular? It would be helpful if she answered either yes or no to these questions.
The reviews which the Minister has announced are, even within her own statements, quite contradictory. On the one hand she states that the purpose of the Quota Review Committee is to consider schools with difficulties after the implementation of Circular 20/87 but then she goes to the Parliamentary Party, the great locus of conversion in the Minister's educational thinking, and states that she is now reviewing all schools. Can the Minister tell us whether all 3,300 schools are to parade before her for inspection in order to see whether they qualify under the circular?
Let me ask her the following questions which she should answer. How are we to know which schools are being reviewed? Will we have to put down questions in this House to find out what schools are being reviewed? Should I ask my local Fianna Fáil Deputy which schools are being reviewed by the Minister? How many schools would qualify for such a review? Would they qualify under this general half sentence review or would they qualify after the circular which has been implemented but which has not really been implemented, has created notional difficulties?
Perhaps, all these questions are irrelevant because buried inside a speech made by the Minister outside of the Dáil was the sentence, "Sanction for the retention of teaching posts will rest with the Minister". Obviously, when all the froth is blown away the cases of individual schools may be made the subject of representations to the Minister who will relay the good news back like crumbs from what is left after her destruction of the primary sector.
Let me ask the Minister another question in relation to the costings and economics which occasionally flit through her speeches. How free is she, in all her reviews, of the Minister for Finance? Let us suppose, for example, that her review committee suggested the retention of the status quo in primary education, could she stand in this House and say that that is what would prevail in primary education and that she could put a figure on it? I pity the Minister in some ways. In the Estimates for the public services, abridged version, for 1988 reference is made to the figures for education. One figure is relevant. The superannuation figure for teachers for 1987 is given as £48,738,000 and the figure for 1988 is given as £54,347,000. The difference allowing for the implication of Circular 20/87 is £5,609,000. The Minister never made provision for the implications of Circular 20/87. She never estimated it or worked out what it would cost. Given the enormous opprobrium she has drawn on herself, even if it is regarded as the new grit of the Cabinet to ignore opprobrium, because of continual statements and appeals from everybody in primary education, parents, teachers, boards of management, why not withdraw the circular now? I ask her to withdraw the circular generously and proceed with her general review of primary education, and she will be thanked and will get co-operation. But, of course, we are told the circular stands or does not stand——
The Deputy must bring his remarks to a close.
For example, different reports on education tell us that the changed demographic situation will allow us to have the benefit of using rooms for purposes for which they were never——
I must now call the Minister.
——to achieving things in relation to the disadvantaged and the new curriculum.
The Minister must now be called. The Deputy's time is up.
The Minister has proceeded with obduracy with a circular that everybody objects to. I appeal to her——
In reply to the request in this Adjournment debate from Deputy Higgins to give to the House the composition, terms of reference, procedures, criteria for evaluation and time scale for submissions and decisions of the Quota Review Committee for Primary Education, I have great pleasure in submitting to the House the answers to the questions asked of me.
As I announced last week, I confirm that I will shortly be engaged in carrying out a major review of the primary school sector of education including the establishment of a primary quota review committee.I have already commenced that review in that I set up a primary school curriculum review committee two months ago and at present they are proceeding with their work. The terms of reference for the overall review of the primary school curriculum will be issued in due time to all interested parties. The purpose of my primary quota review committee will be to see how, within the limits of expenditure laid down in the 1988 Book of Estimates the best possible arrangement can be made in the deployment of teachers, the size of classes and the organisation of our primary schools generally. In particular the committee will concentrate on any difficulties which may arise in certain schools. This answers the Deputy's question as to whether it will be 3,400 or 1,200.
On a point of order, the Minister is quoting the circular. I asked her——
I ask the Deputy to be very slow to raise points of order. He had some 14 minutes to make his case. The Minister has but eight minutes to reply. Let us here her without interruptions.
She is quoting from the circular.
Be that as it may.
The Deputy asked me for the composition, the terms of reference, the procedures, the criteria for evaluation and the time scale for submissions and decisions of the Quota Review Committee for Primary Education, and I am giving him just that. In particular the committee will concentrate on any difficulties which may arise in certain schools——
(Interruptions.)
Deputies, please.
——following the review of Circular 20/87 where the implementation of the circular would create unacceptably large classes. To answer the Deputy's point, that is certain of the 1,200 schools not the 3,400. Two representatives of the School Managers' Association and two representatives from the INTO will be invited to act on the committee together with officials from the Department of Education. It will be the responsibility of the committee to act under the following guidelines.
(1) Problems will be examined in each of the 1,200 schools on a school by school and class by class basis. (2) The average class size will be in the low 30s. The maximum size of any class will be 40. Where, because of exceptional circumstances, it is impossible to adhere to this limit the permission of the review committee will be required and the Minister will then study the data. (3) The effects on schools of population changes will be taken into account. I think all Deputies will agree with this. (4) Special consideration will be given to schools in disadvantaged areas. Surely Deputies agree with that. (5) Special consideration will be given to the remedial needs of schools. Surely they agree with that.
(Interruptions.)
(6) Existing remedial posts will not be affected by the changes under Circular 20/87 nor will special posts in disadvantaged areas. Surely they agree with that. (7) Class sizes must be appropriate to the actual size of the classroom. Surely they agree with that. Sanction for the retention of teaching posts will then rest with the Minister. The principal teachers will be expected under the general direction of the board of management to reorganise class sizes. Surely Deputies agree with that.
(Interruptions.)
Individual classes should in no circumstances be substantially larger than the average in the school. Surely they agree with that. In order to give the review committee an adequate opportunity to carry out a thorough examination——
(Interruptions.)
I appeal to your sense of fair play.
——no changes under Circular 20/87 will take place before the end of the school year June 1988. The Deputies have no sense of any play. Surely they agree with that. The voluntary redundancy-early retirement circular setting out the conditions under which teachers may opt for voluntary redundancy will issue within a few days. Surely they agree with that.
Total expenditure on education is estimated at £1,184 million in 1988. Of this, £420 million relates to primary education.Let me clear up a misconception. It has been widely reported that primary education has received the most severe cut of any sector of education. That is completely untrue. The primary section has been cut by 2 per cent, post primary by 4 per cent and third level by 10 per cent. Total expenditure on education is estimated at £1,184 million in 1988. Of this £420 million relates to primary education and over 80 per cent of expenditure is on pay and pensions. I know Deputy Higgins agrees with me on the guidelines laid down by the Government when they reached agreement with the social partners including the teachers, that the teachers were worth their rise and were not to be penalised by having their pay dropped.
(Interruptions.)
Surely we agree with that.
A Deputy
Who is sacking the teachers?
No teacher is being sacked and the Deputy must correct that statement. There is a voluntary redundancy scheme.
(Interruptions.)
The barracking must cease.
I never said teachers have been sacked.
Deputy Howlin said it.
(Interruptions.)
Deputy Howlin made the interruption.
Deputy Howlin interrupted. Let me put on the record that I have been asked in this Adjournment debate tonight the composition, terms of reference, procedures, criteria and time scale for submissions and decisions of the Quota Review Committee for Primary Education. I submit that I have answered the question asked by Deputy Higgins.
(Interruptions.)
Any costs which may arise from the work of the Quota Review Committee will be compensated for within the limits laid down in the Book of Estimates.
(Interruptions.)
The Dáil adjourned at 9.30 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 2 December 1987.