Ms Kate Duggan:

I will let Mr. Brophy, Ms Jordan or Ms O'Keeffe, from an education perspective, come in if the Senator has any specific questions on it. One of the challenges we all face as a public service is we get funding for pilot schemes, we get funding though the Dormant Accounts Fund, and we get funding in a way that sometimes drives that short-term, immediate response. That can be done in a way that works across different agencies, one agency maybe not knowing what another agency has and, as the Senator said, parents maybe being offered three programmes this week and nothing the next week or next year. Certainly, one of the approaches we support, and certainly in the child poverty unit in the Department of the Taoiseach it is something they are really trying to promote, is a move towards more multi-annual funding of programmes and programmes that are jointly commissioned across services. They are doing a lot of work at the moment in terms of mapping the types of supports going into areas in response to children in particular. We are certainly trying to work more in co-ordination with colleagues through the national Traveller and Roma inclusion strategy, which is a whole-of-government and national approach. We want our actions to be aligned to it but also aligned and integrated with those of other public services. That is an ambition we are trying to look at, because we need to look at where money is going in across agencies, whether it is being used for the right purposes and how we are looking at that from a multi-agency perspective.

It is more about long-term, multi-annual funding and that kind of integrated approach to commissioning certainly being the longer term solution. Ms Jordan may have specific examples.