Ms Áine Lynch:

We have a contribution to make on a couple of the matters raised. Regarding school transport, the National Parents Council position is that it must be completely overhauled, rather than tinkering with it at the edges. There must be a more modernised system for transporting children to and from school. Parents often have children in different schools at different age ranges with different starting and finishing times. It becomes a logistical nightmare to try to get the children to and from school. Then there is the amount of traffic on the roads in urban areas because there is no school transport system within the cities. Instead of going from 8 km to 10 km or this or that mileage, there should be a complete overhaul of the school transport system. Proper school transport infrastructure should be put in place. It could be a mix of paid by the parents, subsidised and free, depending on the ability to pay and other factors. However, there should be a complete overhaul of the school transport system with proper infrastructure put in place for all schools in Ireland. That is our view on school transport.

On the broadband issue, everybody wants high-speed broadband in primary schools. According to the latest figures, approximately 1,000 primary schools currently do not have access to high-speed broadband. Even if we started today with its delivery as the highest priority in the country, we know it would not impact on many children in primary school at present because it would be too late. In terms of digital skills strategies in schools, it is really important that we do not say those strategies will commence when the schools get their high-speed broadband. There must be a specific strategy that deals with what those schools should be doing to develop digital skills in the absence of high-speed broadband. We know from many European studies that children in Ireland are falling behind their European counterparts due to the fact that while they might be passive users and viewers of the Internet, they are not creating digital content at the same level as their European counterparts. Much of that can be done without Internet access. It is important that a digital skills strategy does not wait for one third of the schools to get up to speed to be able to engage with it but has a specific digital curriculum for the 1,000 primary schools that do not have high-speed broadband.

Those are the two areas I wish to highlight.