Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 25 September 2018
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills
School Transport Scheme: Discussion
3:30 pm
Mr. Stephen Kent:
We will do it - even last year, we did so much better last year with all of the email and the social media trying to get in as many applications and entries in advance of that. We were significantly ahead of where we had been. On certain days we were 30% up on last year. We actually closed in as we were coming towards the end of August; we regarded ourselves as being in the best position we have ever been in in the delivery of the scheme. That would not be just our view but the view of the Department as well. We were getting ourselves in a good position. In reality at the moment it is about discovering where we are. We will have a day by day tracker.
Those metrics have been put in place for next year to see if we are tracking ahead of or behind that. This is information that we did not have in place in previous years. We were always scrambling around, trying to figure out what days, when it would arrive and when the peak two days would come. We know what happens when we trigger four or five emails and what it will take. One would hope that it would not take that many, but it does. We may end up having to trigger six or seven emails through next year, take the learning away and then deploy it. Will we need 15 or 20 next year? That is possibly where we may have to gear ourselves up to. We were doing well up to that particular point. There will be a learning because the learning was built in this year, to try to do it and we were much better. We will have to build on that for next year.
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