Mr. Eamonn Moran:

We have a programme at the moment called arts in junior cycle. It seeks to provide CPD to teachers to help them teach the junior cycle subjects in creative ways. An example with English would be a programme called Speaking Shakespeare. It seeks to take the words from the page and put them on the stage. In a number of other subjects, including visual arts, Gaeilge and music, we have a number of other CPD programmes for teachers of junior cycle. Junior cycle teachers also teach senior cycle, so the provision of CPD for them under the arts in junior cycle initiative will also impact at senior cycle. One of the challenges we identified, with which we hope Creative Ireland will help us, is how to work with the senior cycle schools to embed creativity more because the focus moves to the exam process to a greater extent than at primary level.

On DEIS schools, the number included in the programme initiatives are proportionate to the number of DEIS schools. There are about 800 schools in the DEIS programme.

The number of DEIS schools created is more or less proportionate to those numbers. We find when we go around the country that a number of DEIS schools seem to have a level of creativity and artistic projects that are out of proportion to their numbers in that many of the initiatives in DEIS schools are in the artistic space. We work closely with the DEIS schools, their students and teachers to ensure they benefit fully from the Creative Ireland experience.

We will speak later about the evaluation of the Creative Ireland programme and Creative Schools. I must give credit to Ms Tania Banotti. Since she arrived in the Department she has been banging the evaluation drum strongly to ensure that evaluation is built into all the 18 projects under creative youth. As we are in the pilot phase of the project, we want to ensure mechanisms, metrics and indicators are in place to ensure at the end of the pilot phase we will be able to ascertain what worked, what did not work, what might work better and what activities might be able to be mainstreamed. From that evaluation we may also get some findings on the way in which we can focus the initiatives in particular school types such as special schools, DEIS schools and mainstream schools.