School Staff Dail Éireann — 2021-11-23 ============================================================ Rose Conway-Walsh (SF), Mayo The education system is at crisis point and many schools are struggling to stay afloat. School leaders are working up to midnight every night trying to source substitute teachers for their schools for the next day. Many of these positions remain unfilled and many classes end up with no teacher to take them. According to a survey carried out by the Irish National Teachers Organisation, INTO, nearly one third of substitution days were not covered. Does the Minister accept that there is a substitution crisis in schools? Referring to my previous question, is she saying that we do not need school-specific contact tracing? Who will do the contact tracing if she says there is no way teachers or principals will have to do it? --- 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/dail/2021-11-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:51+00:00 Sitting date: 2021-11-23