Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I need not tell the House that the country faced a crisis of enormous proportions which resulted in cuts in expenditure. The country was close to bankruptcy. As the Deputy saw in the statistics last week, 65,000 extra people are back at work in the past 12 months alone. That results in €1 billion extra for the State to invest in services and that is what we are doing. I got €450 million to put into education and I have tried to allocate that to the greatest needs.

I ensured that we will restore guidance counselling and I insisted that would be in DEIS schools. They will certainly get the DEIS resources. I will seek to invest the funding available to ensure the best impact, particularly for children coming with either special needs or disadvantage in the education system. That is the approach I am taking.

These changes are designed to ensure that the funding follows the areas of greatest need. The pilots and refinements are all trying to encourage innovation within these schools to ensure that where something new is happening, it is impacting on the learning environment for children with special needs who come to school or who are at a disadvantage. We want to ensure we learn from this and it is mainstreamed, and that we can look at it as a way of improving performance through clustering and other initiatives.

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