Mr. Frank Hanlon:

We intend to conclude the review of the EPSEN Act in the third quarter of this year. We have received 28,000 responses to our survey and we are analysing those at the moment to see what the major themes coming through are. We have had a wide range of responses both from the surveys and the submissions, including a very considered submission by this committee. We want to ensure we take the time to have all of the major themes that come through from that, which we can then bring to the report. Consultation is a very important part of this and we will be running focus groups for staff, parents and children, particularly children in special educational settings because we very much need to hear from them, as well as from everybody else.

We have tendered for that and it will happen very soon. Some elements of that may take place in September. We have an advisory group which is overseeing this with an independent chair. It consists of a large number of advocacy groups, parents groups and educators. These will be fundamental in respect of agreeing to whatever recommendations come through on this.

I could talk forever on the topic of the summer programme. We have come a long way with the summer programme over the past number of years. As the Deputy will know, it was known as July provision for a long number of years - since, I believe, the mid-1990s. It has been greatly expanded since 2019 and I believe we had 13,000 participants in 2019. In the year past, we had 42,000 participants.

We worked very hard in the past year with stakeholders to ensure that what we offer this year is very much focused on the children who need it the most and we have heard from other committees and from stakeholders in that regard. This year, we have developed a pilot for special schools, in particular. We have a national co-ordinator who is a principal of a school and who has been working with special schools to try to ensure the resources and the time is there for the schools to do it. We have put in a number of supports for these schools to assist them, such as a shortening of the day for the children, which ties in with what works best for them. Both the parents and the schools are very much on board with that.

We have given additional financial supports to these schools, have done specific webinars and are organising more training for people to take part. We have also developed, with the help of the Irish Primary Principals Network, IPPN, a workforce portal, as this was one of the key things, in that if teachers in the schools were not available, we would have other workers who would come in. We have had quite a good response to that with 1,500 people having registered on that portal. That is made available to the special schools as well as to other schools as an additional resource to help them find staff for the summer programme.

The other thing we have done in mainstream schools is that we have combined some element of the programme so that schools are concentrating, first and foremost, on supporting those children with the most complex needs. It has proven to be very beneficial to children from disadvantaged backgrounds and from other countries. For instance, in the past year, we were able to accommodate on the summer programme many of the Ukrainian children who came over at short notice, together with children from other countries. They found it very beneficial to meet other children and to have peer-engagement in that key period over the summer even though many of them had only recently arrived.

We expect to see the numbers increase again this year and, not alone increase, but to be more concentrated on those children who need it the most, whether that is in special schools or in special classes. We also expect to see more peer-engagement in those settings.

One of the key things when we expanded the programme was that it was initially done as a response to Covid-19, from 2020 onwards, and it was seen as a key support to address what had happened to children at that time. Inspectors have gone out over the past couple of summers to look at how the programme has run in schools and we have received such positivity back from the schools which run the programme about the effects it has on those children. This is very much around it being key that the children receive that peer-engagement, have the opportunity to meet the other children in their school, and receive the additional tuition during that time. We have a real drive to keep that going over the next number of years.