Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for that informative and timely reply. I welcome the development of a language strategy and look forward to seeing how that will interact with our numeracy and literacy strategy.

The Minister of State correctly pointed to the complexity of the Irish education system, in terms of this country having two official languages, both Irish and English, and I understand from engaging with parents and teachers that our curriculum at both primary and second level can be quite jam packed. However, we must look at how we integrate the learning of modern languages within the context of our overall numeracy and literacy skills within our schools. To that end, the most constructive line in the Minister of State's response is the one that stated: "However, most schools and classrooms include children whose home language is a language other than English or Irish".

This is about how we harness the potential of the diversity within our classrooms, where we have children in our classrooms whose native tongue is not Irish or English. Rather than making them conform to the school setting, how can we encourage the other children to benefit from the experience of having a linguistically diverse classroom? This is something we should examine. We must get to a point where our students are leaving primary school not as linguistic scholars, but with a foundation in European languages or languages like Mandarin Chinese. This is perhaps a policy decision that needs to be taken.

I call on the Minister of State and his officials to look at the example of Jonathan Swift national school, which has not received extra funding. The funding stream has gone since 2012, but it has continued in a progressive and creative way to keep the links with the Spanish school, to keep the twinning programme going and to keep up the exchange. It is not just an exchange of language.

It is also an exchange of culture. I would also encourage the Department, in the context of European funding for twinnings, to look at how we can encourage more schools to twin with other European schools. Much of the debate to date has been about why the pilot scheme was axed and what would replace it but let us be creative about embracing foreign languages. There are many resources in schools, including secretaries, ancillary staff and students who come from foreign countries. Let us look at how we can harness those resources and pull everything together in the context of our literacy strategy.

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