Press advertisements will appear later this week for a director and staff at the new National Centre for Technology in Education, to be based at Dublin City University. The NCTE will be officially launched within the next month as part of the Government's policy on information technology in schools.
It will be in charge of overseeing the implementation of that policy.
Department sources said yesterday the new centre would oversee the development of IT "as a cross-curricular tool rather than an individual subject" and would monitor the specifications and standards of school computers. It will have a director and four co-ordinators in different areas. Two of these will be in charge of working with teachers, including in-service training, and introducing and implementing a national "intranet", with Internet connections, for schools.
The NCTE will have an advisory board made up of representatives of teachers, parents, school management bodies and industry, and an Education-Industry Forum to involve IT companies in its work.
The latest move is separate from last month's announcement by Telecom Eireann that it will invest £10 million over the next three years to provide Internet connections to all schools, and other communications and computer services to some schools.
While welcoming the forthcoming establishment of the NCTE, Fine Gael's education spokesman Mr Richard Bruton warned that "it is a mistake to think that we are competing well in IT in schools when, in terms of international comparisons, we are standing still.
"Other countries are surging ahead and we need to benchmark ourselves against the best practices in those countries. Ireland lags equally far behind in training our teachers to use information technology as an integral part of the curriculum across the full range of subjects.".
Mr Bruton said the Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin's proposal in a radio interview last week that Ireland would have 40,000 computers in schools by 2001 translates into one computer for every 40 pupils in primary schools and one for every 13 in secondary schools.
He said the Council of Europe had set a target of one computer for every 10 at primary level and one for every five at secondary level by 2002.
This target had been endorsed by the last Government's Information Society Steering Group as "a necessary benchmark for Ireland".
He said 1994 EU figures showed nine pupils per computer in Britain and the USA; 10 in Sweden; 16 in Finland; 20 in Denmark; 26 in Canada and 35 in Holland.
The Information Society Steering Group had estimated there were 73 pupils per computer in Ireland.