John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail)

During the consultative phase for the new national drugs strategy, I, along with members of the steering group, met representatives of the Department of Education and Science to discuss the issue of early school leaving. That Department is also represented on the steering group charged with developing the new strategy and will be centrally involved in the group's deliberations with regard to the prevention and awareness pillar.

Addressing early school leaving is also a central pillar of the actions aimed at children set out in Towards 2016. A number of mainstream actions were developed by the Department of Education and Science over the lifetime of the previous national development plan and are being further developed under Towards 2016. Among these are the work of the National Education Welfare Board, the National Educational Psychological Service and the home school liaison schemes, and actions under DEIS and the Traveller education strategy.

Under the aegis of my own Department, Pobal and the partnership companies have been developing initiatives to tackle early school leaving from a community perspective through community-based youth initiatives and services for the unemployed measures under the local development social inclusion programme. Community-based initiatives in this area also form part of RAPID education programmes to address, among other things, inter-generational disadvantage.

In this context, the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív recently launched the education-themed strategy under the RAPID programme. Under this strategy, each RAPID area will be requested to develop a local strategy that will focus on working with local service providers and programmes on the educational needs of RAPID residents with the aim of improving educational outcomes at primary and post-primary level, increasing participation in further and third level education and improving links and communication between education authorities and providers and local RAPID structures.

The steering group for the new drugs strategy is fully aware of the strong correlation between early school leaving and the early onset of problem drug use. They also recognise that dealing with early school leaving is now a central pillar of the Government's wider social inclusion policy and that community initiatives are being developed as outlined above. Therefore, a key question for consideration by the steering group will be how best to identify actions under a new strategy that will complement and add value to the other initiatives in place to deal with this issue.

See this speech in context