The establishment of a permanent and properly resourced Refugee Education Support Service to cater for the growing number of primary-age children from refugee families will be among the priority motions this year.

The union's general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole, believes the Irish education system did not work for the Vietnamese "boat people", improved somewhat for the Bosnian refugees, but is still not sufficiently focussed or thought-out to cope with the influx of refugee families from these and other countries.

"There are no proper programmes or guidance for teachers," he said last week. "We haven't worked out a balance between creating ghettoes and assimilating refugees to the extent that they're smothered. It's a clear example of not understanding what we mean by a pluralist society."

In the current school year the Refugee Support Service caters for 120 Bosnian and 80 Vietnamese primary school children in the greater Dublin area and is staffed by five peripatetic teachers.

The congress's first motion will demand that the Minister close the gap in the annual capitation grant between primary and second-level schools, reminding both government parties of their pre-election commitment to do this. It warns that the INTO will, if necessary, use industrial action to end this anomaly.

The £150 gap in the annual per pupil grant between the two school sectors is a "huge issue with the members", says O'Toole. The last Budget saw little change, with similar marginal increases to both primary and second-level schools.

Another priority motion demands that the Department start to introduce the new primary school curriculum on a phased basis beginning in 1999, with information seminars in the next school year.

O'Toole said at last year's congress that teachers were worrying about whether the new curriculum would be ready to be introduced in September 1997. Now it appeared it would not be ready in time for September 1998, and some were even wondering about 1999.

After many years of work by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and consensus on the new curriculum by the education partners, the delays in implementation were causing "all the freshness to go out of it," he said.

The congress will also debate a motion demanding that the union keep up the pressure on the Department to continue to use any teacher surplus caused by declining pupil numbers - the so-called "demographic dividend" - to reduce class sizes.