Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 22 April 2015
3. Deputy Stephen S. Donnelly asked the Minister for Education and Skills if she will provide an update on the location, patronage, timeline and proposed opening date of the recently announced primary school in Greystones, County Wicklow; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [15678/15]
View answerThe Department announced a new primary school for the Greystones area, which is very welcome. The local system is under severe pressure due to the number of students, and I am being inundated with requests from parents who are keen to know when the new school will open and its patronage process. Will the school open this September and are there short-term plans in place before the new school is built?
I can give the Deputy one straight answer. The new primary school for the Greystones-Delgany school feeder area will open in September 2015. However, I do not have a definite answer on the other parts of his question.
The patronage determination process to establish who will run the school is at an advanced stage, but is not yet completed. A site for permanent accommodation for the school is being actively pursued. Pending a site acquisition, interim temporary accommodation is being arranged in Greystones for the school.
I thank the Minister for the update and am delighted to hear that the opening date for the school is confirmed for September. I also want to record my thanks to the Department's officials who spent significant time with me on this over the past two years. The parents will be very relieved about the September opening date. I know a process has to be gone through but I would like to point out to the Minister that there is an obvious site for the school, namely, a large housing estate in the Charlesland area with land zoned for a school that never happened. I support that location but I appreciate the officials have to go through the full process.
On a related issue, Wicklow has the fourth highest class sizes in the country. Nearly 30% of students in Wicklow are in classes with more than 30 pupils. In the context of new schools being provided to meet demographic pressures, which is right and proper, are there plans afoot to deploy resources accordingly to balance and reduce class sizes in areas like Wicklow with high class sizes?
I know the officials have engaged with the Deputy, the Minister of State, Deputy Simon Harris, and other public representatives for the area on this matter. I am pleased we have got to this point. Obviously, I have to wait until the new school establishment group makes the recommendation on patronage before we can clarify this. As always with the acquiring of school sites, it is sensitive in terms of price, etc. We cannot divulge any information on this until the process is over the line.
With regard to class sizes in general, I have indicated this is an issue that I am interested in addressing as soon as we are in a financial position to do so but I cannot pre-empt the next or future budgets. The pupil-teacher ratio has been maintained in recent years. We have not made it any worse than it was. We have neither reduced nor increased it. I would certainly like to see an improvement in class size, however. They vary in different parts of the country. Schools have to make decisions around whether they have smaller infant classes or larger senior classes. The actual size of each child’s class can vary but the overall pupil-teacher ratio is the same for the whole country.
I disagree with the Minister on class sizes. Her predecessor claimed class sizes had not been affected but a significant number of resource teachers have been taken away, resources for schools in the delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, programme have been decimated and secondary schools have had their career guidance counsellors taken away. I do not believe it is a reflection of reality or that any teacher or principal would agree with the claim that class sizes have not been hit. Every teacher knows they are under more pressure. It may be possible mathematically to find a ratio and claim it has not changed. As we all know, however, supports for schools have gone down. I respectfully disagree with the Minister on that.
I am glad the Minister will be looking at new resources and at more teachers, something for which I have been advocating for several years. In the deployment of, and in increasing the number of, new teachers, will she agree, as a principle, we should look at balancing it across the country rather than having an imbalanced system? I do not know how it has come to be an imbalanced system but the deployment of public resources around the country in education and in other areas is quite uneven. Will the Minister agree, in the context of more budgets for education and more teachers, that the deployment of new teachers should seek, in part, to target areas where the class sizes are particularly high?
The Deputy has widened the debate somewhat.
We have not cut funding to DEIS. We have increased the number of resource teachers. In fact, there are an extra 1,900 posts between resource teachers, class teachers and special needs assistants, SNAs, in the system this year alone. We have not increased the pupil-teacher ratio.
One cannot have the same number of children in every class in every school because there are small schools with three or four teachers, for example. What we have is a fair and transparent system for the pupil-teacher ratio right across the country which I do not intend to change. If the pupil-teacher ratio is changed, it will be changed for every school depending on its size but the part of the country in which it is located will be irrelevant. That is apart from a small number of schools considered to be isolated because there is no other school within 8 km. In those cases, there is a slightly better pupil-teacher ratio.
