Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

There is a role for schools. The school is probably the primary institution with which parents will interact in respect of their children up to the age of 18 years. We are talking about distilling this down and creating a platform nationally whereby parents voluntarily interact with schools and the programmes are delivered through that. Parents go to parent-teacher meetings. There is no reason that on one night per year there could not be outreach programme, for example, for every school in the country. It would only require two or three hours. Parents would interact with each other thereafter and natural collaborations would begin to build up through parents interacting with each other. If it were to be distilled down to community level, it would not take a massive amount of resources or money to do that.