Ms Caron McCaffrey:

I do not have a comparison of each three-year period. Maths was not my strong point in school. We spent €1.07 million in 2017, €1.16 million in 2018, and then the number increased to €1.38 million in 2019 and €1.42 million in 2020. There is certainly commitment from our perspective. The point about school officers is good. I visit our schools often. Where there is a good, active school officer who sees himself or herself as part of the prison team, the prison works seamlessly, because that person will go into the prison to find somebody who should be in class.

It is helpful in making sure people are at school on time, that if they are missing they are followed up and that people do not just drop out of the prison education system.

We have school officers in the majority of our prisons, with the exception of Limerick Prison. We are opening new accommodation in Limerick Prison and looking at a school officer post as part of that provision. In some cases, they are on a back-to-back roster, which works less well because there is not a consistent person Monday to Friday. Sometimes it is difficult to fill a Monday-to-Friday post. Our staff predominantly work on rostered arrangements and premium payments go with that. Ideally, we would have a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. post but there is a great working relationship between the school officers and the education teams.

It is important that the prison management team see the value in education. I have been meeting all the school principals with the prison governor in each of the prisons over the past two months, just to see the issues, blockages and constraints in each prison, how we could work better together and making sure everything we can do from a service perspective, we are doing to support prison education.