Ms Áine Lynch:

We hope the committee will take into consideration the finding that 91% of parents want a full return to school. Much of the discussion has been around what parents are juggling at home, including work and trying to homeschool their children. What we are hearing from parents, however, is that their greatest concern about children remaining out of school is the social and emotional needs of their children, their lack of connection with school and getting back into school to manage that, rather than the juggling at home which they also recognised was difficult.

We definitely saw a digital divide, not just in homes but also in schools. We saw it in teachers' confidence and competence in teaching through digital technologies. This period has also shown that teaching is more than just a platform. It is a human interaction. It showed that we will not move to a situation where we do not have school buildings and where children no longer go to school and interact and learn with other children. As learning has progressed, we have seen a lot more teamwork between children, involving creative thinking and exploring and developing together. These are key to education and cannot be done with children individually at home on their platforms. The lack of digital access, whether to devices or broadband, obviously had a severe impact on some children.

As well as the digital element, what came through as a key point in the survey was motivation around children learning at home on their own. Even with digital technology, motivation to learn for children sitting at home on their own or with their parents was a key barrier.