Albert Dolan: Education overspend and ASD class changes explained

I'm Agatha Ciarla and thank you to everyone from the Department of Education for being with us today and look just at the outset I mean obviously there is a huge concern as you said you have a comprehensive capital package going forward but there's a real concern about the Department of Education's ability to manage its budget and can you just confirm to me I guess at the outset what is the exact projected overspend for 2026? So Deputy on the capital front can I just say we're absolutely on profile so you know we were given an NDP allocation of 1.6 billion for this year and we are committed to living within that the five-year window for the NDP gave us the ability to plan and to forecast etc and so we are on profile slightly under profile actually and we are committed to living within those parameters there. On the on the current side as we discussed earlier we have we are charged with implementing government policy and Department of Education is a demand led system we're actually very very very transparent I think every principal in the country knows exactly what they're entitled to in terms of the numbers of teachers or down to the hours of teachers on occasion so we're a demand system that is very rules-based as I said 86% of our current budget is on payroll and pensions you know I can go through where the rest of it comes from as well it's very very very transparent so there is an area there that we are engaging with the Department of Public Expansion and Reform on we're having very very positive engagement and we had hoped to be a little bit further ahead but again events in recent weeks have delayed us a little bit but we will have we hope that we will have a resolution on that over the next number of weeks. But just to figure what do you anticipate the total sum is? Again I don't want to say too much publicly but you know the minister is on the record as saying that on the current side she is on the record of saying that it is north of half a billion and so it is a significant amount of money and we're engaging with others on that. And I understand if you know if there's a change of government policy mid-year and that leads to something changing within your department and your estimates and you now need to go back well things like this can happen and like look the government has to be decisive and make decisions so I understand that but where did this go wrong in terms of you know we have a really lengthy budget process departments are you know fighting trying to get as much funding as possible to deliver they're working with deeper they're having debates with deeper they're working with their ministers their ministers are talking to Jack Chambers I mean where did this particularly get out of control that we now have an extra spend of half a billion? So I don't think it's out of control deputy it's it's clearly that there is an amount there that has to be addressed. What caused it is demographic growth as I said that 200,000 extra young people in the system since 2003 38,000 since 2020 and what's also caused it is we've talked about special ed there and the increasing prevalence and all those initiatives we've talked about all those extra special classes on special schools require funding and things like services like the school transport scheme have seen huge growth in demand now 181,000 children traveling on that scheme every day so it is it's mostly down to demographics demand-led schemes. Had we not adequately projected what was going to be required this year? So we did and the paper trail would show that when it comes to predicting the number of teachers etc because we use really good data between CSO data and our POD and PPOD database systems we can predict the number of teachers required to a great degree of accuracy clearly on the special ed front on occasion there can be more demand than is required there have been other initiatives recently that the government have decided the SNAs I suppose as an example government senior political leaders decided to leave those SNAs in place and not to move them there's been other additional measures such as for survivors of sexual abuse in the past so government makes decisions to invest more and then that would be added into the supplementary process as well. So I guess just to round off on that what is the department of education going to be doing in the future to I guess make sure that this doesn't happen again in terms of just just the scale of current expenditure like it's quite understandable at the moment with the uncertainty and the oil shock about price and schools I can imagine it's a nightmare and because even for the construction companies trying to operate it's a nightmare and I'd say deeper is having a nightmare trying to figure out how they're going to fund a lot of the NDB projects because there's so much uncertainty at the moment yes but current expenditure generally would be fairly sticky in terms of the amount that's going to be spent so I'm just wondering how you know reassure me that we're not on a runaway train here. No no we are absolutely and utterly not on a runaway train and again a lot of the supplementary in recent years like the average supplementary across government was seven percent between 22 and 25 for the department of education wasn't seven percent it was eight percent so we were just that little bit above but because we are a big budget we're the third largest vote across government obviously that's that's quite serious over those years again there were once off there were the additional costs from Ukraine from Covid and cost of living and there were pay deals like of the 4.4 billion extra we have in our vote now from going back to 2020 1.7 billion of that 4.4 billion was on national pay deals because we're such a big employer so we are working really constructively with PAIR going forward to have a formula in place to agree how we cost some of it is unpredictable and government has a right to respond but on the other I want to move on to another topic it was brought to my attention from As I Am and Deputy Catherine Ardagh who can't be with us today just to ask a few questions about the pupil teacher ratios for ASD classes and specifically what evidence did the department rely on to justify increasing autism class sizes from 6 to 12 pupils in the pilot? Okay so you talked about pupil teacher ratio there and just to be really really clear that the ratio remains at one teacher for every six students and two SNAs so one student for every six so if there are 12 in a class there will be two teachers so the ratio remains the exact same what was announced yesterday is an initiative that actually is a ground-up initiative whereby some schools that had special classes already in place to serve six children they wanted to serve more children and they said look actually we can serve more children out of that classroom a good inclusive special class is a base you know the children might come into it in the morning but they're out they're being integrated all day so it would be very rare that you have six children in those classes so they're saying we need the teachers and the SNAs please give us the teachers and SNAs. Is that a flexibility that you're going to offer to schools now and how do you see that working? I'll ask my colleague Martina to come in. Thanks very much deputy as the section said this is something that's already happening organically in schools and this is the five schools that we talked about yesterday are post-primary schools so post-primary schools by their nature children are not sitting in one base classroom all day they're moving across for individual subjects so in effect what we've done here is we facilitated schools to do something that they have been doing as part of their existing inclusive practices over a number of years so for example prior to this initiative schools who had so many of the children that have come forward in recent years for special classes are already within the mainstream school those schools want to keep the children there they don't want them moving to new special classes in other schools so what they're effectively saying is can you provide us with resources and supports the teachers the SNAs the capitation the training the school transport can you provide how many schools how many schools are in this pilot so sorry it's not i wouldn't call it a pilot deputy these are five it's been interpreted it's been interpreted as a pilot okay and i think that's i think i think that's um it's it's an incorrect interpretation because what they are is five special classes that are using the resources they have flexibly the department is facilitating them to do that the you will have seen yesterday that the management bodies of those post-primary schools hbi jmb accs these are the people who run our post-primary schools they came out immediately welcoming this initiative because this is what primary schools so it's across five post-primary schools at the moment currently do you anticipate that this will become the standard model model nationally and okay what safeguards are in place to ensure that students' needs are not negatively okay so i'm gonna ask martine to follow up on this but deputy again you know doing the right thing for children and young people is our absolute ultimate it is our absolute priority also we know that inclusive practice is really really important so when we see schools already doing this there's a school down the south that actually only has two classrooms but it has six it has 36 children that are being supported they did that off their own initiative those young people are out being integrated across the post-primary school all day they're doing this anyway so this is a kind of a natural evolution and we are absolutely putting the needs of the i think just on that i and i and i understand now what what you're talking about but i i think it'd be really really good for you to engage with maybe as i am just to clarify this matter and to have an open conversation so thanks very much step is just to say there was engagement with um yesterday when with with with advocacy from this happened but there's further meetings planned we engage really strongly with all of our stakeholders our management bodies our unions our parents our advocacy groups we have a forum which we work with our advocacy groups and and parents we meet with them constantly on all of these issues we'll continue to engage them give them whatever reassurance and i appreciate that i'm just i'm out of time so i just wanted to say kevin you got away from me today uh one last question to you kevin just uh the q4 2025 data when do you anticipate you'll have that published i'll tell you that was published yesterday oh fantastic great stuff in the format you're on the ball kevin clear play i'm in a machine readable format as well machine reader in a machine readable format well i i just want to say to you and to everyone in your section i know that that was probably a headache um but i just want to thank you for the work that went into getting it into machine readable format i hope that going forward it'll become a really easier task to get it up and my next thing that i'll be saying is to try and do the golden thread where we link from the contract to the tender award to the payment uh to see the project outcome and i think if we can link across all of that it'll help for greater transparency for for all departments thank you