Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I will try to be brief. While I do not contest the case made and I accept that teachers are important, students and parents are also very important. We have this built into the webwise.ie activity targeting parents. As I described, the student ambassadors probably have as much leverage as teachers in the school community - it is certainly significant.

On the issue of providing more resources for training teachers, I will conduct a review this year to ascertain how well we execute the upskilling of teachers after they qualify, the resources invested, the way in which they are deployed and whether they are strategically deployed. I will work on the review during 2018.

We have 20 people working in support and well-being and a further 20 people working in Internet technology. These staff have approximately 45,000 teacher contacts in terms of training units delivered across well-being and Internet safety. There is, therefore, a reasonable level of activity in this area, although I would not argue against increasing it following our review.

We need to have digital leaders in every school. We are piloting clusters and these have generated significant interest. Online safety is probably part of the overall use of digital in the school rather than a segmented role that is different from digital in the school. It is digital citizenship, if one likes.

A digital framework is being piloted in 50 schools. We will learn from the execution of the pilot how we should address some of the issues members have described. We have an open mind on the direction we will go once we have the learnings from these initiatives.