Ms Tania Banotti:

I might ask Mr. Moran to address the evaluation of the schools and the roll-out. I draw the Senator's attention to pages 9 and 10 of our submission to the committee which refer to evaluation for all of the creative youth pillar. We have been putting flesh on the bones of the Creative Ireland programme this year.

There are three different ways in which we measure, evaluate and track what is happening under pillar 2, creative communities. For the first time in the history of local authorities, apparently, we have been bringing the Creative Ireland co-ordinator and all the culture teams together four to five times a year. That is the first point. People are brought together to share good practice, for example, somebody tried something in this local authority, how that worked etc. There is the human side of it. There is also a specific online portal. I draw the Senator's attention to our submission again. This is the reason we gave such a detailed document to the committee.

Appendix 1 shows how we track the creative communities fund. We can track it geographically, by audience numbers, by art form and by pillar. There is more detailed evaluation of this than many other programmes and no money can be drawn down unless there are invoices from the local authority. In addition to that, we fan out to the local authorities as a team. We meet the city and county managers and the culture and creative teams. I have only been in the post for four months so I have not managed to get to every local authority yet. There are face-to-face meetings, the online portal, the financial measurement and we go out to each local authority to meet teams and share good practice.