Ms Moira O'Mara:

I will go through the points that were raised in sequence but a common theme across them is the concept of working together and what we are doing about that. We have moved a good deal in the past five to ten years in terms of working together as Departments.

The public sector reform process is supporting us moving further down that road because there is the idea now of cross-Government thinking and reporting.

In terms of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs linkages with, say, the Department of Education and Skills, the literacy and numeracy strategy was a joint strategy between the Departments. The preschool year has brought us together in terms of developing the workforce and the requirement for qualifications in the sector. The area based poverty process is bringing us together also. Both Departments are on the project team and we need to bring the learning from both the PEIP and the DEIS programmes because they ran in parallel. We do not want that to happen with the new initiative. We want them to work together.

The school completion programme is an example of a programme that moved from the Department of Education and Skills to our Department. We need to review that in terms of its future position.

With the Department of Social Protection, the school age child care initiative is an example of some of the savings from the child benefit reduction being transferred into supports for low income parents. That is a start on the road of a connection between funding and service provision. It is about the linkages and the balance between them.

Deputy Ó Caoláin mentioned and Senator van Turnhout focused on the need to use our resources better and to work better together. We have a very good convergence this year in terms of the policy framework, which I hope will be brought forward towards the end of September. The cross-departmental policy framework is being developed along with the establishment of the child and family support agency, the consolidation of the children's services committees, the new area-based response to poverty, and a number of reviews of the programmes we are implementing in the Department. As Deputy Conway said, having flat cuts regardless of the value of the particular project or programme does not make sense and therefore we are carrying out a review of our youth programmes and also a review of the school completion programme. We have an opportunity to reconfigure them and make them fit with whatever objectives we identify in the policy framework. That might be a little ambitious but I am hoping that by the end of the year we will have a clear direction as to where we are going in the Department with our resources in terms of reconfiguring them and using them better, and the way we are linking up with other Departments.

That leads me to the area-based poverty response. There are a number of elements to that. On the one hand we know there are areas where poverty is more deeply entrenched than in other areas, and they will always need more significant intervention, particularly for a period of time, be that ten to 20 years because it is a generational issue. However, we need to mainstream. The new initiative will build on the learning of the PEIP and of DEIS. It will move to consolidate and also push towards mainstreaming, but more exploration of the programme will have to be done because we are not quite there yet in terms of developing it fully and knowing exactly where we want to end up.

Senator van Turnhout asked if 38 weeks preschool was enough. It is modelled on the primary school year. It was designed to be one step down in terms of what children of that age can manage. Under the PEIP one programme was trialled which involved a longer number of weeks, a longer number of hours, and better ratios of staff to children. There were some improvements in the outcomes for children, although not as many as members might have imagined. One idea that we could develop in the new initiative is separate the three strands whereby in one area we might have a 45 week programme and have the lower ratios and so on in the other areas. That would give us outcomes as to the best way to proceed in two or three years time.

On the question of inter-agency and interdepartmental work being difficult, we have moved towards that. We are half way down that road and we will continue to do that. The review of the programme was to get better use of resources, which are an issue.

In terms of measuring outcomes, that is very much at the heart of what our Department is doing. As members are aware, we have a dedicated research unit. In youth programmes, for instance, national quality standards are now in place. That is measuring outcomes from all the services. We are in most cases moving to a situation where we want to see what is being delivered by a project. We are taking a balance between policy evaluation and value for money because one project might be achieving the same outcomes as another project but with fewer resources going into it. I hope I have addressed some of the issues raised.