I want to give the Minister of State an opportunity to inform the House with respect to the current situation regarding employment contracts for adult educators and whether he has any plans to review these contracts, improve on them and make them more career friendly. Will he outline what the future holds for this important sector?

A proposal was issued to staff representatives last year to establish a new grade of adult educator, with a standardised pay scale aligned with the Youthreach resource person scale. A number of issues arose in subsequent negotiations with staff representatives on the implementation of the proposal. These issues have since been resolved and agreement reached on a revised offer to tutors employed by education and training boards in adult, community and further education settings.

Existing adult education tutors have the option of moving to the new incremental pay scale with effect from 1 April 2023 or remaining on their current terms and conditions. Assimilation to the adult educator scale will be based on the tutors’ current rates of pay and their full-time equivalence will be based on their current contracted hours. The contractual obligations of adult educators will be to deliver 1,044 contact hours and an associated 782 non-contact hours, equating to 1,826 hours for a whole-time post.

Tutors on fixed-term contracts will be issued with adult educator contracts on renewal of their contracts and all newly-hired adult educators will be appointed to the new grade and commence on the first point of the scale.

The education and training boards were notified of the implementation arrangements in April. With a view to ensuring implementation takes place this year, the ETBs were requested to issue offer letters to allow sufficient time for tutors to consider their options in order for contract changes to take effect from September 2024.

I thank the Minister of State for his response and congratulate him on the work being done in this area, which seems to be very progressive.

Will he comment on incremental pay rates and career progression in this important sector? Many adult educators work with some quite vulnerable clients and students who need a lot of help and assistance to progress. In some instances, there is no certainty with regard to employment going forward, contracts and so on. Is it the case that in some of these instances contracts run from September to the end of August, break and then run again. Will the Minister of State comment on that general area?

I thank the Deputy and will make a couple of other observations. The cost of this deal have been estimated at €2.6 million assuming all tutors assimilate. However, the actual cost will be dependent on the numbers of tutors who opt to assimilate into the new grade. We have asked the ETBs to maintain records to facilitate the identification of the costs.

The Deputy asked about the future.

The implementation of these arrangements will be fully reviewed after 12 months to ensure that we can learn from it. I also want to mention that this option does not apply to tutors engaged in adult self-financing programmes in FET colleges or those who are ineligible for access to public service pension schemes. There is more detail on that which I will forward to the Deputy afterwards.

Will the Minister of State give an indication of how many adult educators are involved in this scheme nationally? How many students are impacted or benefiting from the various schemes or courses involved here? The Minister of State has given an indication of the total extra cost but has he any indication of the total overall budget involved in the sector?

I do not have that information to hand at the moment but will get the data for the Deputy as requested.