MINISTER FOR Education Ruairí Quinn has warned that there will be no increase in teacher numbers and that the State “must do more with less”.

Mr Quinn told the Dáil that ahead of his attendance at the annual round of conferences in the primary and post-primary school sectors, he needed to make it clear that the State no longer had the capacity to increase teacher numbers.

“We have to operate on the basis that we must do more with less,” he said.

He also said it was not possible to revisit the previous government’s decision to place a cap on the number of posts available under the special needs assistant (SNA) scheme. There were 10,575 whole-time equivalent posts in this area and it was “a very significant number”.

Unlike other areas of the public sector, “vacancies are being filled” up to that 10,575 number. He said that the resources provided for assistants this year were greater than had been provided in previous years. The Minister said that with careful management and distribution of these resources there should be sufficient posts to provide access to SNA support for all children who required such support to attend school.

He added that the Government had decided to adopt the specific budgetary targets that had to be met in 2011 under the EU-IMF programme and “the importance of meeting the targets cannot be overstated”.

Mr Quinn was responding to a Fianna Fáil Private Members’ motion that “education and training should be protected as priority areas for funding in future budgets”. In an unusual move the Government accepted the motion and the Minister said he doubted there was anyone in the chamber who would disagree that education and training would play a central part in economic recovery and job creation in the years ahead and that education and training should therefore be protected. But he added that “our hands are to a great extent tied by the rope of indebtedness that the previous government has woven for us”.

Fianna Fáil’s education spokesman Brendan Smith said he wanted to “acknowledge the ingenuity of Government scriptwriters in finding new ways to explain how policies which were disastrous on March 8th are today radical and visionary”.

The Cavan-Monaghan TD said there were unique elements to the difficulties in Ireland’s education system “but the underlying education issues in areas such as literary and standards are ones which are shared with many countries”.