Ms Eleanor McClorey:

Before responding to Senator Colm Burke, I will make a number of observations on the points made by Deputy Catherine Byrne, specifically the powerful and vital point she made that we should not load everything on to schools. Ms Quinn put the matter well when she described the parent as the primary resource and central element of the area based strategy to tackle child poverty. No one is more committed to children's rights and no one is a greater advocate and defender and protector of children's rights than an empowered and resourced parent. We engage with parents across the community, from pregnancy and birth onwards, to provide a coherent, integrated set of services that are specifically designed to increase their capacity to be a powerful advocate and driver of outcomes for their children. That point was very well made.

While I focused on literacy and methodologies in the classroom, I should emphasise that primary schools in Ballymun have broken new ground by sharing their literacy data with us. All of them have given us permission to analyse this data on a whole community basis. We also engage with individual schools, confidentially with principals, on what the data is telling us about how we need to work more closely with the schools in our literacy strategy. There is, however, a parallel family and community literacy strategy that is activated across the life cycle of the child. As such, it is not the case that everything is placed on the shoulders of our teachers who work so hard already. While they have embraced this change strategy, this does not mean parents are having this role removed from them.

On the quality, duplication and integration of services, I will focus on the youth sector. I note from the Chairman's opening comments that we should not refer to organisations by name and I will not do so. The most recent round of cutbacks targeting the youth and community sector were applied across the board. We have a dynamic youth sector in Ballymun which spearheaded the change strategy with youngballymun. Key leaders from the youth sector in Ballymun development group invested a couple of years of work in designing the prototype which we, youngballymun, further refined and implemented. They spearheaded accessible youth mental health services, evidence based youth practice and new ways of documenting and coding the work they were doing. None of this was taken into account when the cuts were applied a few months ago and no recognition was given to best practice, evidence or innovation. Instead, cuts were applied across the board and the service in Ballymun was cut by the same amount as all other services. As Deputy Catherine Byrne noted, there are services which do not embrace this kind of innovation and resist accountability. The lack of incentive for best practice must be tackled urgently in the funding allocations to the youth sector, particularly in respect of communities where agencies have had an opportunity to engage with evidence. Those communities which did this are being treated as if they had not done so. There is something terribly unfair about this failure at policy level to stimulate a best practice culture.

Senator Colm Burke raised the issue of joined-up thinking. Based on our experience of learning in youngballymun, joined up thinking must start with a blank sheet or large empty space on which one then notes a few critical or key points. We had evidence based area need and my colleagues have discussed some of the key criteria that underpin our strategy. Outside of that, our local service providers and community designed the work that is done by youngballymun. Those elements of the prototype design, if one likes, that they were not confident could be implemented were set aside and the providers developed a revised vision for the strategy. If one has speech and language therapists, public health nurses, teachers and community leaders sitting around a table designing a service, the likelihood that they will embed changes in their practice is much greater than if a committee from outside the area were to tell them what they must do. In some respects, it much more difficult to embed change when one is not part of it as one does not fully understand it in such circumstances. However, one also has resistance to imposition and control. While policy, funding mechanisms, standards and so forth must be centralised, we also require a bottom-up element. We had this across the three strategies. There was a prototype, a top-down with our funders and ourselves and then a bottom-up approach which was taken at the level of each local community.

The issue is not solely the programmes - the evidence and what one does - but the process in which one engages to enable joined up thinking. At this stage of the work - members have heard my colleagues from Tallaght and Darndale make the same point - it is also about incentivising the change process through funding lines. Funding must be continued where there is an opportunity to deliver and design change and if an agency is not willing to avail of this opportunity, accountability must come into play, particularly to the local community. I am delighted to extend an invitation to members to visit us.