205. Deputy Claire Kerrane asked the Minister for Education and Youth if she is aware of teachers who have taken up roles in primary schools possibly being left waiting six to eight weeks to be paid post appointment; the action he is taking to ensure the delay is not six to eight weeks as some teachers are being told; the actions that can be taken in the interim to financially support teachers; and the way in which he will ensure that this never happens again and the teaching panel is released earlier in the year. [66128/26]

My department provides a payroll service to over 3,700 schools and the Payroll Division relies on schools to submit information in a timely manner to ensure prompt and correct payment of salary.

The department issued the 2026/2027 staffing allocation schedules to schools in March 2026. This provides schools with its teacher allocation for the forthcoming school year and ensures that the school has sufficient planning time for its recruitment.

During a school year, there can be over 10,000 primary school teachers who require payroll adjustments and the majority of those occur during the summer months. Payroll adjustments can include teachers being recruited for the first time by a school, resigning from their school, rolling over their contract from one year to the next, starting or returning from a career break or starting to work in a job-sharing capacity or retiring.

It can take between 6 to 8 weeks to onboard a teacher to salary and my department committed to ensuring that where schools submitted instructions no later than the 10th July, then salary would be paid to the teacher for the first payday in September. Any instructions that are received after that date will be processed in date order and salary will be paid as soon as possible.