Ms Cynthia Deane:

Our plans are to promote enrolment and to promote the schools in the local communities. The schools do a very good job in promoting their services in the local areas. Currently, they are running open evenings and enrolment events to which local parents and primary school students are invited. Schools take responsibility for that and we support them by helping them with their publicity and so forth. We are hoping that our new school in Carlow, for example, which has capacity for 1,000 second level students, will grow to fill that capacity because there is a demand for extra places in Carlow town. The Department carried out a demographic survey some years ago and discovered that there was a shortage of 800 places in Carlow town for the years around 2020. It decided to invest in a new second level school for the ETB in Carlow, which is a great vote of confidence in what the ETB does in Carlow. Likewise, in Kilkenny, we are included in the building plan for 2018, for a new campus on the fringes of Kilkenny in a growing housing area for two new schools for Kilkenny city vocational school and our Gaelcholáiste. We have plans to grow enrolments in our schools throughout the two counties.