Mr. Pat McKelvey:

To take up what my colleague has said, the DEIS programme has been very beneficial for the schools, including the home school liaison and bringing people into the building. Very often the people that we are trying to target may have had a negative experience of going to school or they may have had no experience of coming to school. The very act of physically bringing those people into a building can be a major step.

Schools become DEIS schools based on Pobal percentages. There are many children and families in non-DEIS schools who suffer equal levels of deprivation and who, unfortunately, do not have that access to home school liaison, etc. That may be problematic in itself. In our experience, schools are very proactive in bringing in parents with purpose. Where it has worked well, there are training programmes for parents. Some of those are around parenting and some are around understanding.

The Senator made a really good point about parents who may not be au fait with the education system and how it operates, and for whom the current enrolment process can be quite daunting, for example. Which pieces do they have to do, when do they come in and how do they know about the different elements? There is work to be done in that respect. In fairness, our schools are getting better but rather than the school deciding what they think the parents need, we must go to the parents and ask what they need.