Mr. Noel Kelly:

A great deal of work is under way on reforming local government. Unfortunately, however, another set of boundaries is about to be developed for the new child and family support agency. A decision must be taken at national level to establish one set of boundaries and require everyone to work to it. This is a real challenge when one is engaging with agencies. For example, we are in a particular area of Dublin City Council but the health board area with which we work only encroaches into a little corner of the council area as most of its work is in the Fingal County Council area. This is presenting a challenge in conversations we are having with key officials in the Health Service Executive as they tell us they cannot focus specifically on our area because they have a responsibility to the wider area. We must find a way to devise coherent boundaries. The country is not so large as to require 20 different sets of boundaries. The boundaries of the child and family support agency, which is one of the great hopes for the future, need to be realigned with other boundaries as otherwise we will have a further layer of confusion.

I thank Deputy Catherine Byrne for her positive comments. I failed to mention that parents who want to create change in their family often meet the greatest resistance within their family unit. The issue is not necessarily an external one and resistance is not always from agencies or schools but often from within the family. The change process taking place in families is as difficult or probably more difficult than the change process across services. We must empower and equip parents to step to one side and decide to do things differently, which means taking a different route from that taken by everybody else. We must appreciate that this is extremely difficult for members of families which have experienced three or four generations of unemployment, addiction and so forth. I am delighted that the first parent in our programme who got her child to school immediately joined our board of management. Perhaps there is something good in that.

Mr. Candon referred to the Write to Read literacy project, which has been running in one of the schools in our area. This is an Irish produced literacy programme, similar to that to which Ms McClorey referred. It is great it is being extended to a number of other schools. As Ms McClorey and Mr. Candon pointed it, the purpose here is to provide continuing professional development for teachers as opposed to giving people a two day course and telling them the issue is sorted. We will change professional practice by continually monitoring, checking, supporting and upgrading as well as addressing difficulties. There is an appetite for this in schools and other settings provided the right supports are made available.

Members will probably not be familiar with implementation science because it is a new concept in Ireland. Experts in the United States make the point that training achieves 5% of the impact whereas coaching and mentoring achieve 95% of impact. We have never done the coaching and mentoring piece. Instead, we delivered training and told people to go and apply it. We must reduce training and refocus on supporting people to implement the practice.