Mr. Steven Daly:

It is an interesting question. To address the teacher training question first, we have seen an interesting change over the past five years since we have been working specifically in Ireland on the teacher training side. To explain quickly how it works, the training we deliver normally is delivered either after school or rarely, on Saturdays. However, it often is delivered in conjunction with, for example, a half-day whereby a staff meeting might take up a certain proportion of a half-day and then our trainers will deliver a training session. At other times, the training is timetabled in throughout the day. We might take a small group of teachers, perhaps four or five, and focus on a particular aspect and deliver the training that way. What we have seen, especially in the past year and a half or two years, is a shift where delivering that training has become much more challenging. This is due to the changing industrial relations environment and due to the Croke Park agreement hours with which teachers and school principals are working. The main challenge with this is the Croke Park hours generally must be taken as a lump and consequently, the entire staff must be involved in an activity that is to be put down as the Croke Park hours. A major challenge for us is that we cannot split up those hours, deliver training to, for example, five teachers on a Wednesday afternoon with the effect that those five teachers therefore have completed the Croke Park hours. Instead, we must take the entire staff, which could be 30 or 40 teachers, and deliver a training session, which obviously loses its impact because one is not able to give each individual teacher as much individual attention. In addition, the session is curtailed a little by the hours. Consequently, we have seen the changing situation in the education system over the past few years affecting the training.

To combat that, we have also worked more closely with some of the education centres. For example, we have delivered training in conjunction with Blackrock Education Centre on a pilot basis, which has worked very well. One of the larger challenges we have is that our training is not recognised as official CDP days, something which we are working towards. It is a difficult process.