Mr. Noel Kelly:

I will take the first question posed by Deputy Funchion about the school completion programme and I will share a little bit of information with the committee. There are 124 school completion programmes around the State serving 700 schools. These are predominantly DEIS schools but we also have some non-DEIS schools that feed in to DEIS schools. This scheme has been in place since 2002. It followed on from its predecessors the 8-15 early school leaver initiative and the stay in school initiative. The school completion programme currently has funding of €24.7 million per annum - and as the Deputy has correctly said, between 2010 and 2011 when the austerity cuts hit there was a 25% cutback in budget - so it has come from a budget of some €32 million. There has been stability and since it came in to Tusla we have managed to stop the gap so the funding has remained stable.

We are very fortunate that our parent department, the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, has managed to generate a fairly significant funding increase for Tusla. There are multiple demands on that funding, but as part of our budget bid this year one of our demands was for an increase of 5% of funding towards school completion. The budget has arrived in Tusla now and we are working on it internally. I am confident that we will get an increased allocation for next year. We have to recognise that a commitment has been made to the new schools that have come in to the DEIS programme and that they must be included in the school completion programme from September 2018. Some of the increase in our funding will have to go towards including those schools but I am certainly optimistic. It is a very small increase in funding, but it is a start. It is one of the matters we spoke about with the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Zappone.

There is significant reform underway in terms of school completion, such as a very significant continuing professional development programme, similar to the home school liaison programme CPD, because there had not been CPD within school completion for some time.

School completion staff had six days of continuing professional development, CPD, last year. There are also some significant issues around governance that we must address. That is under way at the moment and I am confident in that regard. Tusla is 100% committed to the programme. This sounds like a broken record, but I will say it again, I spent six years working in school completion and I can see the benefit of the programme. All of the programmes working seamlessly together really do make a difference to children. School completion is primarily targeted at children who are most at risk, or children who may have dropped out of the school system. It makes a real difference to children who are right on the margins. Our commitment is definitely to grow the scheme and, over the coming years, to try restore some of the funding that has been lost, especially as the State is now in a better economic situation.