Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I propose to take Questions Nos. 38 and 62 together.

The issue of child protection and ensuring all children in every primary school are aware of child protection issues is a high priority area for the Department of Education and Science. The Stay Safe programme is a personal safety programme for children. It is designed to give children the knowledge and necessary skills to help them deal with potentially abusive or threatening situations.

It is also recognised that the programme must cover those individuals closely involved with children on a daily basis, namely their parents, guardians and teachers. To this end, Stay Safe involves professional in-service courses for teachers and seminars on parent awareness at individual school level. This is in addition to the teaching of a personal safety skills programme to pupils.

The training of teachers, parents and boards of management in the Stay Safe programme and the development of guidelines and procedures for a school policy on child protection is provided by a network of 31 regionally-based teachers available to the programme on a part-time basis. The support supplements the assistance provided by the Department of Health and Children which maintains an administrative office for the programme.

An initial one-day in-service training seminar on the Stay Safe programme has been provided for all primary schools. Since the programme was introduced, 99.7% of primary schools have participated in the training. The Department does not have an accurate survey of each school implementing the Stay Safe programme. However, to ensure the most accurate up-to-date information about the implementation of the programme, a survey will shortly be sent to all primary schools. I will provide the results to the Deputies in due course.

It should be noted, however, that while the Stay Safe programme is not mandatory, the teaching of a personal safety programme to ensure child protection is now an integral element of the curricular subject of social, personal and health education, SPHE. This is one of the 11 subject areas of the revised primary curriculum, mandatory for all primary schools.

The introduction of SPHE as a subject on the revised primary school curriculum, combined with the implementation of the national child protection guidelines, Children First, gave an additional impetus to the Stay Safe programme. The combined impact of these developments has ensured child protection issues remain central to teaching and learning in our schools. It also ensures a high level of awareness and the necessary skills to address child protection issues is maintained in all schools.

Once the results of the Stay Safe programme's survey have been received and processed, the position on the implementation of the programme will be clearer and the question of whether it should become mandatory can then be addressed.

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