Ms Anne Tansey:

We have run a competition for the past five years. Our numbers have increased and it is not just the numbers that we have been sanctioned. We have had an increase of ten per year and then 17 last year. It is not just those increases. We have retirements and we have people who resign from our organisation. We have a rolling need to fill vacancies within NEPS. There are largely two colleges which provide the professional training programme for educational psychologists. These are Mary Immaculate College in Limerick and UCD in Dublin. We have generally been able to fill our vacancies through recruitment from both of those courses, and sometimes through recruitment from the UK.