The Minister for Education will tell the INTO conference in Ennis, Co Clare, this morning that within two years every primary school in the State will have at least a shared remedial teacher.
Mr Martin will accept there is a problem with remedial teaching. There are more than 1,200 remedial posts now in the system, but some schools have little provision and nearly 800 have none.
He will say the needs of smaller schools may need "new approaches". This is understood to refer to proposals, currently under discussion with the INTO, for the payment of grants to schools so they can make their own remedial teaching arrangements, perhaps employing part-time, retired or Montessori teachers.
The Minister will also announce a major programme for training teachers in information technology skills, with 8,000-10,000 teachers, about a quarter of the profession, undergoing training courses before the end of the year. Department sources say this will be one of the largest ever in-service training programmes.
Mr Martin has already said that by next September all 3,200 primary schools will have at least one computer.
Department sources claimed yesterday that the Schools IT 2000 programme, the first phase of which Mr Martin will announce in 10 days, will be completed in around half the time it is taking other European countries to carry out comparable computer installation programmes.
The Minister will also repeat his determination to end sub-standard primary school buildings, although he will not mention a timeframe in his speech. He will acknowledge that over a long period the resources allocated to renovations and buildings have fallen far short of schools' needs, and many children have not had adequate school accommodation during their entire time at primary level.
Department sources said yesterday that the timeframe for doing away with sub-standard buildings would depend on which schools were identified as such by a new, transparent points system for assessing schools' accommodation needs on which a consultancy study, due at the end of May, was working.
One source said all schools on the INTO's own list of seriously sub-standard schools would come into this category and would be dealt with by the end of the Minister's term of office.
Mr Martin will also recognise that current teacher shortages, described as "an education system in crisis" by the INTO president, Mr Tony Bates, need to be addressed. He will accept that cutbacks in the number of students going through the teacher-training colleges have been too severe in recent years.
Pointing to his decision to increase the intake into "top-up" graduate courses by 200 last September, he will promise a permanent increase in primary teacher-training places beginning this September, and in places on the graduate programme next January.
The Minister will also note that a report on the best ways to establish a "badly needed" National Educational Psychological Service will be presented to him within two months. In the meantime he is appointing 15 new educational psychologists.
He will try to counter those who say he is setting up too many review groups by emphasising the need for dialogue and partnership. He will say most of the groups have "a fixed and ambitious timeframe" for their reports.