Ms Emer Egan:

I think that our relationships and sexuality education, RSE, programme for primary and post-primary schools is absolutely fit for purpose in that it is primarily about helping children to acquire knowledge and understanding and to develop attitudes, beliefs and values about their sexual identities, relationships and intimacy. The programme fully facilitates that. It is a fact within our system that ethos will influence how the programme will be taught in a given school. In drawing up the policy on RSE at the level of the individual school, there is plenty of scope for all views within the school community to be thrashed out and for decisions to be made on how a particular issue is to be dealt with.