Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

The Deputy asked pertinent questions yesterday about capacity planning and whether the Department done any pre-planning in the context of expressions of interest from schools and educational staff to establish whether the promised programme was deliverable. When it was initially announced, it raised the hopes of thousands of parents. As the weeks have gone by, we have realised that all is not what it seems in terms of the numbers and capacity. Only 200 schools have registered. Those schools do not have the capacity to deliver a school-based summer programme for all the children enrolled in them. The number of children for whom they can cater is limited by the number of staff who have opted in. Some 9,200 parents have registered. I encourage other parents to register an expression of interest now, go through the process and see whether their child qualifies for the scheme.

To reiterate, we will know until about October how many of the thousands of people who registered have managed to engage with a tutor or an SNA in the home. It is going to be very late in the day where anybody can laud this as being a successful programme for supporting students.

It is about capacity. One should not promise our families anything unless one knows one can deliver in terms of capacity.

On the HSE-led measure, which is the third aspect of the summer programme, the Ministers, Deputies Harris and McHugh, have indicated that they would like to support 1,200 children. This also depends on the opt-in of SNAs and the opt-in of school buildings whereby a school that is not doing school-based summer provision or, indeed, is has expressed an interest in making its building available to the HSE for a HSE-led scheme with SNAs opting in. Again, the Minister, Deputy McHugh, said yesterday that of the 200 schools that have opted in for a school-based programme, 35 have opted to provide a premises for the HSE-led scheme. There is absolutely no way we can guarantee capacity for 1,200 children to be supported through this respite-based programme rather than the more educational-based programme.