Ms Cliodhna O'Neill:

I can certainly speak about retention at school level. The Deputy will be aware that further education and training is under the auspices of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. I have a very small amount of information from a shared publication we have in respect of that but I cannot really speak to that more broadly. When we look at retention, we look at the cohort, which means a group of pupils and when they entered school. We look at students entering in first year. The most recent data we have is for students who entered first year in 2016. These people would have progressed to leave school, if they sat the leaving certificate, either five or six years later, so the most recent data we have is from two years ago.