School Staff
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-16
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Shane Curley (FF), Cultural and Educational Panel

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as ucht teacht isteach. I raise this issue in the context of a conversation I had last week with the INTO over in Buswells Hotel. While a lot of what I will raise probably highlights negatives that exist within the education system and offers solutions to them, I also acknowledge the good work that has been done.
In the 2023-24 school year, Ireland achieved its lowest ever student-teacher ratio at primary school level. In the context of the global turmoil we see and the uncertainty that exists across the world, that is a huge achievement and must be acknowledged. However, large class sizes remain the reality. The average primary school class size in Ireland is 22.5 students, in comparison with the OECD average of 21 and the EU average of 19 students per teacher. We in Ireland, as a wealthy country, instead of trying to achieve the average across Europe and the OECD, should strive to be standard bearers in this area. In my party, we pride ourselves on being the party of education. We have huge work to do in this context.
From a teacher's point of view, we talk all the time about the crisis in retaining teachers in the country, and retention is one of the key issues here. We have 419,823 children in oversized primary school classrooms, if we take that EU average of 19. That is 996 teaching posts unfilled, which shows the unattractiveness in some ways of the role and the problem we have facing the retention of teachers. A total of 7,864 substitute teaching roles are being covered by unqualified teachers, which, again, is not a good reflection on our primary school education system and it is something we need to work on. As to what that looks like in practice, we have 51,028 primary pupils who were educated in the 2023-24 school year in class sizes above 30 pupils. That is a lot. That is 1,637 primary school classes that had over 30 students. The fact that our record low number of students in the 2023-24 student-teacher ratio still had those startling statistics shows how far we must go to improve that.
My ask is clear. We need 1,000 extra teachers in the 2026-27 school year at primary level to bring us in line with the OECD and EU averages and to try to push ahead and be one of the standard bearers in this field. Why? First, take a student with special educational needs. As a teacher myself, I think I did my best teaching in smaller classes. It is way easier to spread yourself across a classroom when there are 12, 13, 14 or 15 students in it, as opposed to trying to teach 30 students, which is just not doable. Students with additional needs, in particular, need a lot of the teacher's one-on-one focus. When that is not available, it reduces the effectiveness of that teacher in the classroom, no matter how good a teacher they are.
Second, we could also look at rural Ireland and the number of one- and two-teacher schools that are in danger of closing. A rural school is the focal point of a rural community that might have only the school, the post office and maybe a small shop and the local pub. That school is a vital cog in that whole area's social fabric, and we need to be really careful to make sure that we keep rural Ireland alive when it comes to these schools. Could we look at maybe a lower teacher ratio that we target in some of the more sparsely populated rural areas?

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-16