Dr. Karl Kitching:

I wish to respond to the questions on education. Senator Ruane asked about forms of knowledge. The national Traveller and Roma integration strategy and the migrant integration strategy call for anti-racist and intercultural training and professional development for teachers. I have not seen that happen. It needs to be prioritised but unfortunately it is sitting on a shelf. To get people involved who would not otherwise be interested, that training needs to be mandatory.

Second, I mentioned the school excellence fund as an example which could be emulated and the inspectorate is very much involved in that. The inspectorate's involvement in working with schools to fund applications would incentivise schools and communities to work together. I would be the first to say that sometimes we are preaching to the choir. It can be very difficult to reach people who would otherwise not be interested.

On wider professional development, we have seen strands 1, 2 and 3 of the programme for access to higher education, PATH, achieve some good success, particularly PATH strand 1 for under-represented groups' access to teacher education and becoming teachers. We really need to support and expand the PATH schemes and focus on the experience of Traveller teachers in that respect. More needs to be done there. There are a lot of good recommendations out there but we must make them real.