Ms Gráinne Cullen:

This has come up. It is part of the story. We often say that we can manage that piece of getting them into school, but it is about how we get them in. One of the big learnings from the STAR pilot project was the involvement of parents, exactly as the Deputy said. Some of that is around the confidence of a parent to be able to engage with the school. Sometimes, it is around the practice of the school, where everything is done in the school but maybe the parent had a really bad experience in his or her own school life. It is about how we build the confidence of those parents to do that. That is done through the local partnership groups and the projects working with the schools. That link worker element we talked about is huge in that regard.

It is also about the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and its element of the strategy in terms of literacy levels. Sometimes, some of the engagement can be very difficult because it is done in the school in a particular format or way that maybe does not work for parents who have low literacy levels. Investment in adult literacy at the further and higher education end of things is very important, as is some targeted work there in respect of Traveller parents.

On linking out to the communities, the Deputy put his finger on something that is covered in the evaluation from STAR and that we need to dig into more. A huge piece of work has been done in the STAR evaluation that we have only just started to really engage with as regards this plan and our work with the new teams. There is definitely that element of the school connecting into the community. We also get the feedback that the Deputy is getting from leaders and teachers in our school system. There are a lot of things in the community but it is about how we make sure people are linking up to those. There are supports other than everything falling on the principal, the teacher, the SNA or whoever it is within the school system. We have a lot of work to do but we hope we-----