Today I want to highlight the issue of school spaces, or the lack thereof, and the desperate need for joined-up thinking between Departments to ensure early indicators are there, so we know where we will have issues. More conversations are needed between the Department of Education and Youth and the Department of Social Protection, potentially, around the number of ECCE applicants we are seeing in local areas, which I do not believe is taking place. Otherwise we need to look at the census data from year to year to see who is coming on stream. Ultimately, these children are applying for schools but the schools do not know how many kids are coming in and we are left short of spaces. Currently in Leixlip the population is continuing to rise and there are over 40 children still without primary school places. In Naas all the schools have come together - the eight primary schools - and have said they do not have spaces. They are all making applications at this stage to the Department but, ultimately, this information should be known ahead of time in the local areas. If we have that data, we need to use it. This is the key point I want to make. We are not forward planning well enough. We are putting in the houses, as we said earlier, but at the same time in the likes of Leixlip, Maynooth and Celbridge, we are not seeing planning ahead.

I thank Deputy Neville for raising this issue. He makes this point quite often and he is right about County Kildare and the population and the need for public services, including education, to keep up with it. The Department tells me that it basically divides up the country into what it calls school planning area levels. It looks at both enrolment and child benefit data. It updates it annually and it is geocoded to the 19,000 small areas across the country. From that, it analyses at a granular level the population of school-going children and the schools they attend. It is not currently using ECCE data. I think there is something interesting about that, considering the number of kids now involved in ECCE is so high. I will certainly engage with the Minister on that. I will also ask her to come back to the Deputy directly in relation to Leixlip and Naas.

The Department tells me it has consulted with St. Corban's National School in Naas and has sanctioned the opening of an additional junior infant class for September in an available classroom to meet a specific demand there. We have also seen the completion of a new 32-classroom co-educational primary school in Naas and the establishment of a new primary school in Leixlip. The Minister, Deputy Naughton, will continue to engage with the Deputy on the issues.