Mr. Michael Gillespie:

The Senator asked about IT facilities which are very hit-and-miss across the country. There is no overall policy. Two schools in the same town might be using different platforms. There is no shared training because they are all using different platforms. We are working with the Department on emergency-response learning. Arising from this, it is clear that there is nothing better than face-to-face teaching in school, especially for disadvantaged students. Therefore, it is really only an emergency response. If there was more joined-up thinking and if the system was more coherent, we could share training and have similar platforms. We do not want to give any company a monopoly but unfortunately there are monopolies in terms of what is happening with IT. One of the big problems is that it is not consistent across the system. We have now discovered that nothing is better than face-to-face teaching. Having students in school is the top priority.