Ms Patricia Sheehan:

I thank the Deputy for her question. Major investment has gone into the new special education model for the allocation of teachers. That commenced fully this year, but was piloted in the two years prior to that. More than €1.9 billion has been invested, which is an increase of 52% since 2011. Many supports are going into schools and it is important that we look to see and be sure about how those supports are being utilised. Schools need to be able to cater for the diverse cohorts of children now entering. We are increasingly moving away from segregation and towards trying to ensure that teacher capacity exists. Initial teacher education will focus on preparing teachers to meet the needs of all children in schools, including Traveller children. We also want to ensure that continuous professional development, CPD, will be examined as well.

Touching on Senator Coffey's point regarding further education, I should have mentioned that there is an investment of approximately €800 million in that sector in literacy and numeracy. We have an education sub-committee within the national Traveller Roma inclusion strategy, NTRIS, which has representatives from all the different elements of the Department, from early years to further and higher education, as well the Traveller representative groups. That education sub-committee is committed to implementing the 31 actions in NTRIS, which are across the life cycle. A number of those actions concern further education, while some 15 or 16 others relate to primary and post-primary education. We are going to work on that with Traveller groups in January 2020 in respect of setting indicators and on having an implementation plan.

We had a meeting with the group, which brought SOLAS and the ETB in to meet the Traveller representative groups some months ago. We will also follow up on that meeting. Regarding a plan, all of the actions within NTRIS cover many of these issues. They may not make specific identification, but they are broad enough to identify where there are further needs and where we need to be addressing and directing our investment.