Mr. Paul Rolston:

Very definitely. That is true of transition at both stages, from primary to post-primary, and from post-primary to tertiary as well. However, to answer the question asked, the service does not necessarily always follow from primary to post-primary. In fairness, efforts to address that are beginning and hopefully it will happen. Critically within the broader spectrum, what I spoke about earlier was that there is no doubt schools are a centre of the community. They are an education centre of a community. Moyross and lots of the pilot schemes are demonstrating how when you work with the community, with the school at the centre, but also reach out to incorporate everybody, those kind of supports naturally follow through. There is an automatic link from primary to post-primary into the community. That is why I said in our presentation that it is not necessarily just about schools. Unfortunately with the best will in the world, while our schools can demonstrate brilliant systems, they tend to be institution led. This is particularly the case at post-primary level. I am conscious that a lot of the conversation is about primary, but we have that traditional scenario where each school is an entity unto itself and does not necessarily reach out. It looks after the institution in many instances rather than the pupils. However, there are brilliant schemes out there within the teaching council. There is the BEACONS project, which is beginning to roll pilots out now. That is about parents, schools and community right across the board working together to educate the children. Real life nowadays does not happen like it did in our day, when you were in school and then you come out and you go to play or you do whatever. Life is now lived right across the community, not just in school. It is critical that we all work together, parents supporting schools as well as schools supporting parents and community. Moyross is a brilliant demonstration of that happening spectacularly well. There are pilot schemes around the place on various different aspects. One of the bigger questions that has been made repetitively is how pilot schemes, which are supposed to pilot things, end as soon as the pilot scheme finishes. The pilot scheme is there and designed to see if something can work and then expand out to everybody else. Our pilot schemes take place, are looked at, get stuck on a shelf somewhere and are not rolled out. These things have been there for many years as we have been speaking now, and it is time for action to deliver these across the education system. This will facilitate and support all families, but particularly our students. It is critical from the point of view of helping them to be in a better place and to learn better from the point of view of the education side of things. Education is about us, and is about us personally in the first instance.

We need our young people to understand and manage that side of things so that they can learn for themselves.