Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe said today he did not believe that increasing class sizes by one point in terms of the teacher/pupil ratio would have a significant effect on the outcome of children's education.
Mr O'Keeffe also accused the two main Opposition parties of using out-of-date figures and of misleading the public in claims made on class sizes and the provision of psychological assessments for children.
Fine Gael education spokesman Brian Hayes said today figures showed there were now 100,000 primary school children in class sizes of 30 or more.
Mr Hayes said the Minister’s answer to a parliamentary question tabled by Fine Gael supported his contention.
He said over 80 per cent of all schoolchildren (400,000) were in classrooms of 20 pupils or more “despite Fianna Fáil’s election pledge that no child under nine would be in a class that big”.
The Minister said, however, that Fine Gael was continuing to “irresponsibly alarm parents across Ireland in its latest statement on class size that is based on weeks-old information already in the public domain”.
Mr O’Keeffe said there were now over 30,000 primary teachers in schools throughout the State.
“In the primary sector alone, about 7,000 extra teachers have been provided since 2002. In the last school year, almost 80 per cent of pupils were in classes of fewer than 30 pupils.
“With over 20,000 individual classes spread across all schools throughout the country there will always be differences in individual class sizes,” he added.
“I do not believe that increasing class size by one point at primary and post-primary levels will have a significant impact on the standard of educational outcomes.”
The Minister estimated that the Government’s proposed change from an average of one teacher for 27 pupils to an average of one teacher for 28 pupils would affect teacher numbers in about 10 per cent to 15 per cent of primary schools next September.
In the Dáil this week, Mr O'Keeffe conceded that there would be 1,000 fewer teachers than planned from next September. He had consistently stated that only 200 teaching posts would be lost in primary schools because of budget cuts, while the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) has repeatedly stated that 1,000 teaching posts would go.
Separately today, Labour Party education spokesman Ruairi Quinn said figures provided to him showed that just over half of primary schools have a psychologist assigned to them under the National Educational Psychological Service Agency (Neps).
Mr Quinn said a parliamentary question he had tabled showed that 54.4 per cent of schools had a psychologist assigned to them and he said children, parents and schools deserved to know when “serious deficiencies” in the service would be addressed.
He said the Minister had given him “some guff on how great the NEPS is, claiming that schools who don’t have a psychologist assigned to them, can avail of the Scheme for Commissioning Psychological Assessments (SCPA)”.
“The truth of the matter is that the service made available to schools via the SCPA system is at best patchy, and falls far short of the kind of service that troubled children deserve.” Mr Quinn said.
He said that while schools, in theory, had access to a qualified professional psychologist under SCPA, the reality of the situation was that in many instances, schools “find it nearly impossible to find a practitioner who will agree to undertake an assessment”.
“SCPA was never meant to be any more than a stop-gap solution, but in many parts of the country it has become the mainstream service. This problem is particularly stark in counties such as Westmeath where fewer than 18 per cent of schools are covered by Neps, Kilkenny where the figure is 19.2 per cent and Carlow where it is just 26.2 per cent.”
In a statement, Mr O’Keeffe said the claim was “misleading because it is based on last year’s data”.
“Deputy Quinn’s assertion is based on coverage in the 2007/08 academic year when the number of Neps psychologists in the system was about 136,” the Minister said.
“As I explained to Deputy Quinn in my Dáil reply, there are now 151 Neps psychologists and we expect that number to grow to 164 by early January.
“Most of these new recruits have joined the system since the beginning of 2008/09. Conveniently, though, Deputy Quinn chooses to ignore this information and attempts to mislead the public by passing off dated information as if it were current.”
“There are now 151 psychologists employed in my department's Neps service, including some 21 psychologists who have been appointed since the end of last June. Each has been appointed to a specific NEPS office and will, following the requisite period of induction and work-shadowing, be assigned a full complement of schools,” he said.
The Minister said he had actually announced an increase in funding for Neps in the 2009 Budget and it was envisaged that up to 50 more psychologists would be appointed.
“The recruitment of these psychologists will begin early in the New Year from the existing panel of qualified personnel. I do not consider it helpful for Opposition politicians to advance misleading claims or to distort the facts on important issues such as the provision of a psychological service for our young people.”