I propose to take Questions Nos. 162 and 155 together.
With the establishment of my Department in October 2020, the Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (Transfer of Departmental Administration and Ministerial Functions) Order 2020 (S.I. No. 451/2020) transferred functions vested in the Minister for Education to me. These functions included those under the Further Education and Training Act, 2013. Accordingly the grants paid to SOLAS, which may be advanced to the ETBs for further education and training programmes, are paid from my Department’s Vote or the National Training Fund. The transfer of budget lines between the two Departments, including for the PLC programme, has been reflected in the Estimates for the current year. These changes have no impact on the payments to ETB employees or their terms and conditions or to the situation in dual provision schools.
As the Deputy may be aware, the Education Shared Business Services (ESBS), which is a section of the Department of Education, was established to host a range of shared services, including the payroll (including travel & subsistence) shared service for the ETB sector. The ESBS acts as an agent on behalf of the ETB for the purposes of processing salary payments, however the individual ETB remains the employer and there are no changes to any ETB employees’ terms and conditions of employment as a result of the transition to the shared service. ETB employees access their payslips and other pay related documents via an Employee Self Service (ESS) with queries being handled by the ESBS Payroll Helpdesk via email, post or telephone. The migration of ETB Payrolls (and T&S functions) to ESBS went live in June 2019 and 11 of the 16 ETBs have migrated to date.