Mr. Tom?s ? Ruairc:

On a point of information, there is a migrant teacher project which the Deputy may be aware of in the Marino Institute of Education. It has a network of more than 2,000 teachers who qualified abroad. The project runs a bridging programme for those teachers from the point of registration into employment. Obviously, there is cultural competence at their fingertips, as they are natives of these other countries. Really impressive work is being done there. More than 220 teachers across four cohorts have been through that bridging programme. There is another course on cultural competence in the community context. We have used a model in our consultation on the statement of strategy called BEACONS, that is, bringing education alive for our communities on a national scale. We did a sample exercise as part of an OECD project with the community in Youghal where Ukrainian parents and children were brought together with teachers and parents at the same time to look at the issues they were facing in education, as well as their opportunities, to try, in a community context, to broaden the cultural competence as well.