Ms Áine Lynch:

On digital access, one of the difficulties at this time was not whether the schools had the digital access because teachers were teaching from their own homes as the schools were closed, so that caused a lot of the difficulty. One of the questions asked was whether remote learning would be a feature of the future. It will be, particularly for children who are immunosuppressed or have underlying health conditions. It may be quite a feature of their future.

Although up until now I have said that there have been real difficulties with the home learning for younger children who are not independent learners, we have also learned of things that have worked very well and we really need to make sure that we capture that and develop those. There are lots of learning applications that children really engaged with. RTÉ's "Home School Hub" worked very well, and we got very good feedback from parents and children about that. There are certain formats that have worked well and we need to make sure that we learn from those so that in the case of children whose return to school will take longer, we are able to provide them with the best learning experience possible.