THE Comptroller and Auditor General has criticised the Department of Education for its short term "reactive approach" to the provision of school accommodation and its lack of long term planning.
In a report, the Comptroller stays the Department should adopt a more proactive approach in bringing about successful amalgamations of schools."
Its traditional approach is to wait for the schools themselves to, come forward with individual projects for improved accommodation and extensions, rather than "formulating and implementing a long term strategic plan."
The report says school building projects are currently assigned priority for funding on the basis of consensus judgments" by staff in the Department's building section, without any "set quantified criteria" for choosing them or distinguishing between them.
It points out that the use of such criteria would ensure that the most deserving projects would be included. It notes that the Department is developing a points based priority system to achieve this.
The report says that information about the current stock of second level school accommodation is held on paper files and is neither readily accessible nor always up to date. It notes that a costly computerised management information system for the Department's building programmes was bought in 1985-86 but never became fully operational. It was later deemed to be incompatible and obsolete.
The report echoes the opinion of participants at the National Education Convention that the Department does not have a clear national policy on school amalgamations. It notes the convention report which recommended that the Department should publish detailed enrolment projections for each region, its expectations for school amalgamations, and its order of priority for such amalgamations.
It also says the Department does not have any national occupancy figures or projected enrolment levels for second level schools.
Neither does it set any output targets for the building programme which could help in monitoring its effectiveness. Thus there is no target for the total number of places to be provided.
The report expresses concern that some extensions are to schools which have themselves only recently been completed. It questions the reliability of the original enrolment projections of these schools and the value for money in having two building projects instead of one.
It gives as examples of this the July 1995 funding by the Department of extensions to community schools in Castlerea, Co Roscommon, Cashel, Co Tipperary, and Gort, Co Galway, which were completed only in 1993, 1994 and 1995 respectively. The Department had approved four similar cases since then.
In a statement, the Minister for Education, Ms Breathnach, said the work of the Commission on School Accommodation Needs and the establishment of regional education boards would give a considerable extra boost to the schols) rationalisation process.