Mr. Adrian Flynn:

Two of the core values of ETBI are community and equality. It starts with that engagement and with the school as the centre of the community. I contacted one of our schools in the past week regarding book rental. The school is in a disadvantaged and deprived area. They managed with the book grant, which provides €39 per student, but this only gets them as far as the junior cycle. I was informed by the school that only 7% of students had purchased books in fifth year. This impacts massively on the school, the classroom, the teacher, the learner and the home. Some of the provision in the school completion programme provides a fantastic model that we should look at and address. This goes back to my point about the cluster support in the community and that all partners in the communities have this as an item of their agenda, which is to understand their community.

On the book grant, a school that is growing or a new start-up school will only get the grant based on October returns from the previous year. If the school has 50 pupils enrolling in a year and has 100 pupils enrolling the following year, it will not be able to provide adequately. This needs to be addressed.

With regard to technology and educational purposes, one of the areas on which to focus is the learner. I refer back to the junior cycle and the IT skills and digital skills embedded in that, which will ultimately link to the future jobs we do not yet know of and for which we do not even have terms. These will be digital skills-based. We need to map this and join it up. It stems, essentially, from the learner leading the learning and the teacher being trained and properly equipped to scaffold the learning to allow the critical thinking and creativity that our future population will have.

With regard to the issue of moneylenders, I refer back to the community.

Supports in schools, such as home-school liaison officers, pastoral care and the work of tutors and year heads to maintain a connection with parents, are important for us to focus on and invest resources in. If we empower those who have a direct connection with the families most in need, we can obtain the information we need to support them best.