Ms Marie Kelly:

Good morning, Chairman and members of the committee. I am the director of training, education and employment services for the Rehab Group.

The National Learning Network is about removing the barriers that prevent people from progressing. I refer to people who have barriers in their lives, such as early school leavers, people with sporadic work history, low literacy and numeracy ability, acquired brain injuries and illness and mental health issues, including not being able to function, not being able to get out of bed in the morning and looking at suicide as the only option. I refer to people who are really suffering. We work with people who are recovering addicts and with ex-offenders. More recently, we have been awarded contracts to assist the long-term unemployed.

Our programmes are equally applicable to many people. We work with people and explore what they want to achieve and analyse what is needed to educate them and what will improve their social inclusion. Our clients range in age from three to 65 years and we work with primary schools, further education and SOLAS. I wish to acknowledge the positive comments made by SOLAS and the HSE earlier. Our outcomes speak for themselves. On average, 90% of the people who complete our programme get into employment or further education every year. We have highly qualified staff who form multidisciplinary teams. An interesting staff statistic is that 75% of our costs relate to pay, of which 91% is spent on front-line services provision.

We have recently entered into a FÁS contract for training, which we tendered for. We have been successful in the provision of courses for the long-term unemployed. We have tried to diversify our business because we believe the skills we have acquired through the provision of support services to people with disabilities represent an opportunity for the wider population.

All of our work is underpinned by service level agreements. We have had 23 service level agreements with the HSE and a similar number with SOLAS. The agreements govern quality as well as the various Acts that we work under. They also govern outcomes and key performance indicators. We exceed our quality standards. The National Learning Network has been awarded a level 5 excellence award in every centre in the country. We have also been awarded the European quality and social services excellence award. Last year we had 159 review meetings with SOLAS and 235 review meetings with FÁS.

NLN is about working within the community. It is about dealing with people who are marginalised - people who are looking to remove barriers but need support to pursue further education, training or employment. We provide a wide range of courses such as culinary skills, catering skills, business, IT, games design and web design. We work with 3,500 employers. They work with us to provide real jobs and real work experience. We have 50 locations in Ireland and we now provide services to more than 7,000 people through a range of very well qualified staff, teachers, psychologists, programme development officers and rehabilitation officers. We put the client at the centre of everything we do.