Mr. Seán Cottrell:

I will address a few questions that have not been answered so far. Everyone needs extra resources, but if a school does a good job and its scores increase, will it be punished by having resources removed? Removing resources from a school that has been effective is a major blow psychologically. This should be kept in mind, as it can be demoralising for people. There are few workplaces where the better one does one's work, the fewer resources one is given to do the same work next year. There may be such places, but I have not encountered them.

I welcome the model. Great work has been done in this regard and I commend the group, but I will make a couple of points. It is a breakthrough in terms of equity, with "equity" being the key word. The model should be extended to include not only children with special needs, but also children facing socioeconomic issues - those in the DEIS programme - Traveller children and children with English as an additional language, EAL. New Zealand has combined aspects and put together a framework. Under its weighting system, a child with autism might be considered the same as, for example, 2.5 non-autistic children, and a child with no English might be considered to be an additional 0.5. In this way, a school with 200 children might have a total allocated resource base of 275, with the extra 75 stemming from the additional weighting. Perhaps this suggestion could be considered. We do not want there to be differences in allocation between different aspects of school life.

I acknowledge Deputy Jim Daly's remarks, but we have never encountered anything like the level of commentary and anger on our helpline for principals about their having to ask parents questions concerning sensitive information, particularly in the case of medium to small-sized schools where everyone knows everyone else. Indeed, the principals might even have taught the parents. The questions are about social welfare payments, whether parents have mortgages, whether they are living in local authority housing, and so on. This is not a good idea. Some people have referred to the advantages it provides and a number of partners may believe it has some value, but I am not sure they would say the same if they had to stand at the school door asking parents these questions.

Guesstimation is not acceptable in today's world. I spoke to the CSO which has not only electoral districts but also small area districts on which it can churn out phenomenal amounts of information. These typically comprise household groups numbering 300 people. The CSO can produce information about, for example, the primary earner in a home, whether family income supplement is being received, whether a mortgage is being paid, parents' education levels, and so forth. The breadth of its information far exceeds what has been collected by the survey. Perhaps the CSO should be reconsidered in this context. The senior official to whom I spoke claimed that producing the relevant data would be possible if the CSO were given the brief. Those data would be based on clusters of 300 people. Principals have no difficulty with providing or reporting data on educational matters, but whether a family is receiving income supplement or paying a mortgage is not a school's business and asking questions like that damages the trust between school and home.