Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That was really interesting. I acknowledge the work of Mr. John Lonergan, who has highlighted many of these issues over the years. I did some work with him quite a number of years ago and he continuously spoke about the prison population. There are really good things being done and I will speak to them in a moment but there is really a failure of the education system when we see 80% of the prison population is made up of early school leavers and those who did not see a place for themselves in an education setting.

That issue is beyond the scope of today's conversation but how we address it must be a consideration at the forefront of our education committee. How do we make it so that young kids of 13, 14 and 15 do not give up and feel there is no place for them within the education system? It is a fault of the system when we see such high numbers. We need to make changes.

Studies have shown that a significant number of young people have been failed by the mental health services. My goodness me; we need to be rescuing much earlier in people's life cycles. We must put our heads together to ensure we do that. I commend the work of the education and training boards, ETBs, whose openness I am very familiar with. We need such openness at secondary school. The openness in addressing many of these things needs to continue and to be supported. When I see what the curriculum is made up of, I think it is no wonder that people feel there is no place for them there. We need to look at that and examine how it serves people. Not everybody learns the same way. We must consider how to adjust our curriculum in a more timely way to enable learners to learn in an environment that suits them.

I will ask a couple of questions around those issues. Mr. O'Connor's submission to the committee states that 4.6% of people in prison have literacy issues, which is far above the national average. What are the challenges around assessing literacy levels? I note that one of the actions in the strategy was to complete a literacy and numeracy audit of the prison population. Has that been completed? Relatedly, what progress has been made in compiling the education statistics? Do we have any figures on enrolment in education courses after release? Perhaps we will talk about what happens after release in a moment and first we should concentrate on getting the statistics we need.