Vol. 512 No. 1
27 Mr. M. Higgins asked the Minister of Education and Science if he will make a statement on the closure of more than 100 national schools recently arising from industrial action taken by school principals as a result of the failure of his Department to provide secretarial and caretaker support; the plans, if any, he has in relation to rural support; and the funding, if any, he has sought from the Department of Finance for this. [25341/99]
Last year I established a working group, representative of the partners in education, to consider the role, duties, responsibilities and rights of principals in primary schools, and to make recommendations in that regard. The group report was formally presented to me on 10 November. As I made the remaining points in a previous reply, to save time perhaps the Deputy will ask a supplementary question.
Primary school principals, who are usually fairly restrained people, have taken partial industrial action and if the matter is not resolved they will seek a mandate at their conference next Easter for more widespread action. Does the Minister agree the changes in the curriculum and the responsibilities placed on principals puts them in an impossible position? A principal of a school with up to ten teachers is a full-time teacher. We have gone over some of this already. As the Estimates have been prepared, will the Minister indicate how much of the problem he is in a position to deal with? Is he in a position to change the figure from eight to six or will there be a special arrangement for the third tier? Will the three tiers identified in the previous Supplementary Estimate be addressed before the summer?
I have already said the strikes were not justified, given that I had set up the working group in consultation with the partners. The report was not completed by the end of the summer—
The concern was that the Minister had made no commitment on the recommendations of 1991. It does not matter which Administration is in power—
I understand the sense of anger among teaching principals and I have met them. However, we have made major inroads in the funding and resourcing of primary education in the past two years. I felt people should have waited for the publication of the report and the beginning of a process. I can confirm we have begun that process and the issues identified by the Deputy will be dealt with and negotiated in that context. We are in the middle of that process and I am not in a position to give details.
I am not interested in that. We discussed the substance of this in a previous question and perhaps both questions should have been combined. Will the Minister depart from the expression of a gross sum spread across the three tiers of the problem? How can the Minister address the problem with £1,500? It is necessary to take an approach that will relieve the pressure on teaching principals so they can give instruction and leadership.
I take on board what the Deputy has said. Up to now there has been a very low rate of assistance to schools who receive secretarial assistance and many schools receive no assistance. We made a commitment in September to reduce the figure to 100 but many remain below that figure.
The question related to caretaker support.
I was referring to the caretaker issue and so on.
