Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Green Party)

The Minister is no doubt aware that one in seven children leaving primary school have reading and writing difficulties. She stated that she is not looking at providing a new national testing system at present. Will she consider allocating the resources that may go to such a testing system to the provision of additional educational welfare officers or an expansion of the home-school-community liaison scheme? Many disadvantaged schools are very well resourced for special needs assistants but not so well resourced in the pupil-teacher ratio. However, they could have hands-on assistants which could be better than testing.

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