Ms Gráinne Cullen:

I thank the Deputy for the question on the link workers. When we did the consultation on the strategy, we had a lot of feedback from the people in the regions where there are high Traveller and Roma enrolments in our schools regarding the supports available to those children. STAR was a five-year pilot project supporting Traveller and Roma in our schools. It had a number of extensions because of the Covid-19 pandemic and we have a very comprehensive evaluation done of that work. It created STAR teams in four different regions. As Ms O'Neill said, it is about linking up some of the services already in place and then bringing in extra, targeted resources as necessary, namely, our education welfare officers, school completion programme people and home school community liaison people. There were education workers within that STAR pilot project and some of the learning from the piece was around the barriers to some of the work they were doing in terms of the link to the school and making sure those workers, when we put them in place, are able to really integrate and work with the people in the schools and all the services already there. Out of the consultation work the idea of community link workers was established. We also had an OECD review of our DEIS programme, which is our key policy for addressing education disadvantage. Across Europe there are cultural liaison officers. We decided to call them community link workers to make things a little simpler. They will work within our school completion programme structure and therefore will have the benefit of working with those other services.

The Deputy asked about attendance. It is actually a key focus for us as a Department following the Covid-19 pandemic and the changes in the attendance patterns generally. We see in our attendance figures that Traveller and Roma children are more affected, which we know through our DEIS programme. The DEIS schools show greater challenges in attendance post-Covid than mainstream schools. The idea is that these link workers will be an integral part of that network of people in these regions. They will work with a focus on attendance but also on participation, engagement, and the link into the school and school culture in terms of diversity and inclusion and making sure the learnings we have from the STAR pilot, which were very positive, are carried through. It is like we are scaling the pilot out into a wider number of areas.