Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The Comptroller and Auditor General, in his statement, welcomed DEIS and the fact that it will co-ordinate the resources and services that are available. Although this country has a high standard of literacy, there is no doubt that those at the bottom are not doing well. It is significant that in surveys carried out by the Department on literacy levels in disadvantaged schools the findings were very poor. At the same time, many of those children were in small classes of 15:1. Some of them were even as low as 11:1, yet the literacy levels were not good.

This only proves that the problem cannot be tackled in isolation within the classroom. It must be done in the context of supporting the family and through the targeted initiatives. With initiatives such as reading recovery, mathematics recovery, the first steps writing programme and the family literacy programme, we will tackle this in a holistic way, using all the expertise within and outside the schools.

The Deputy is correct to ask about targeting and getting results. One of the criteria for inclusion in the DEIS scheme was that schools had to sign up to planning and targeting.

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