Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

To be perfectly clear, there were no funding cuts regarding the school completion programme 2014-2015 allocation of €24.7 million. Tusla has confirmed that the funding this year is €24.756 million and that there has been no cut in funding for the year 2016-17. I am not sure where the Deputy is getting that information from and I am not clear on her concerns about the scaling back of this kind of programme. The opposite is the case. In terms of school completion, the ambition is to engage in major reform. That is already taking place in terms of the response of the education and welfare service with a director, who I had the opportunity to meet because of my own concerns in this regard, responding line by line to the different recommendations from the ESRI report to make it even more effective. That is the first phase with regard to our commitment to the school completion programme.

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