Ms Carmel Ryan:

RPM originated in the States. It has been used in many countries all over the world. It is being used quite widely in England at the moment as well. An Unlocking Voices group is very active in England. It is being used in Australia, South Africa and all over Europe. As I said, it is not recognised in schools in Ireland because it is so new.

It is a kind of catch-22 situation. It is very difficult to research something if it has not been introduced. Therefore, in order to research and follow up on it to see how it works or how it can be improved or could work in an Irish situation, we would first have to get it into a school. We would have to be using it in a school and then maybe research and track the children's progress as they go along. Then, at the end, we would see where the children started, how they progressed and where they ended up.

All along, when we have been doing our RPM sessions with Fiacre and when we had tutors over from England or the States, we have been taking videos. We took a video of Fiacre at the very beginning when he was maybe just making two choices - "Yes" or "No". From there we moved to spelling words on the board and then on to spelling sentences. Now, we have some videos of him using an iPad. That is a way of researching it and tracking children's progress but again, in order to do that, we would need to have a school that is willing to take it on, and we have a number of schools. We would need a school that is willing to take it on. We would also need support from the Department to say that with the permission of parents, teachers and the board of management, we would video children's progress once per week, have a look at it as we go along and then maybe produce a paper at the end on how effective it is.