Mr. Gordon Jeyes:

We and the Department are on the task force and that is being built in, in a much more helpful way. We will give extra resources to family resource centres once we move beyond the first assessment stage to resettlement.

Given my educational background, I am very sympathetic to the points Senator Colm Burke raised. We need to have further strategic discussions with the Department of Education and Skills. There is a gap for young people who need to learn in more practical ways. The Department quite rightly wants schools to cater for all of Ireland’s children. There is a minority who need other ways, such as the Cork centre. It is fundamentally an issue for the Department of Education and Skills, although we want to be able to support the children. In the delivering equality of opportunity in schools, DEIS, review we see our work with the school completion programme as helping the individual child to make the transition and emphasising the out of school provision, as the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, report suggested, and complementing whatever comes out of the DEIS review, which the Department of Education and Skills advocated.