Professor James O'Higgins Norman:

The Senator's first question was to me on the audit. The audit we are speaking about is on the action plan itself at a national level. Its procedures were published in 2013 and they have not been updated since then. With regard to the research that informed them, we remember that at the time there was very deep consultation with all of the stakeholders. It took a lot of work to come up with the action plan and its procedures. Some people have asked for a new action plan or new procedures. Before we go down this road we believe it would be better to audit the national action plan to see how it measures up against more recent research and the latest in terms of international practice on whole education approaches, such as what was published by UNESCO last year. It would be a task for the Department to lead the audit, with support from ourselves and others, and see how it measures up today, the guts of ten years after it was first published.