Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 17 July 2025
Committee on Key Issues affecting the Traveller Community
Traveller Participation in Education: Department of Education and Youth
2:00 am
Ms Cliodhna O'Neill:
The Deputy referenced video resources for teachers. I thank him for acknowledging that. It was a very strong piece of work by our colleagues on the national council.
Thanks again to Dr. McGinley. It was referenced that it should be important to see how the culture is portrayed in that and in other materials. There will be ongoing development of those kinds of materials. It is understood how important the visual representation of culture is. We recently had an event to mark the STAR project and the evaluation that Ms Cullen referred to. We saw how well the young people responded to a really strong representation of culture. There was great feedback from that event about how much it meant to come in to the clock tower in the Department of education and see the work, art and artefacts the young people had produced on display in that way. We have certainly taken that to heart in the design of the documentation and so on. We have very received very strong feedback from the community in respect of that.
On the query in relation to social workers in schools, the primary presence of Tusla in the education system is through the Tusla education support service, TESS, and the warranted officers are the educational welfare officers who have responsibility for attendance and so on. My understanding is that a child can be referred to social work in Tusla when there is a significant concern about that child. There is a strong connection between the educational support service in TESS and the child welfare section of Tusla because they are colleagues in the same organisation. The primary focus within the school system is on attendance and well-being in the school. If there are further issues which warrant the involvement of a social worker, a school can make a referral to the educational welfare service and that will be picked up on the welfare side within Tusla.
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