Mr. Stephen O'Connor:

Deputy Ellis asked how we encouraged Travellers to attend education courses. Our single most powerful way of doing so is by ensuring that, in our education centres and classrooms, they feel safe and free from the kind of racist abuse and innuendo that can occur in other education centres. It was noted as far back as 2010 in Dr. Niamh Hourigan's report that the first time many Travellers experienced racist abuse was when they went into mainstream educational courses. In many ways, it was masked when they were all being educated together. That is a sad reflection on our society in general. A priority for us is ensuring that our centres and classrooms are free from that type of name calling, references to people's mode of speech and that kind of nasty stuff, which can undermine a person. It is not surprising that, at a human level, people are reluctant to engage in our mainstream education services. There is just too much of that stuff happening.

We ensure that the curriculum is relevant to the Traveller community, including the community's needs in living in a society that is integrated in an inclusive sense. I sometimes have reservations about the term "integrated". It should be "inclusive", in other words, where both the settled culture and the Traveller culture are recognised and settled people feel a willingness to participate in courses that have relevance to Traveller culture. We find that this is one of the positive aspects of many of the events that we organise around Traveller culture. The settled community in the prison were also present at the events and were curious about some aspects of Traveller culture. This is another way that we try to bridge the gap between the settled and Traveller cultures, with each getting its fair share of respect.

Ms Edwards might like to speak about something else that we do, that is, proactively going after students within the prison. We send people into prisons to tell them about courses. It would be best if Ms Edwards spoke about this, as she has an interesting story about her work as our outreach worker and co-ordinator of our TPI.