Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for appearing at the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response yesterday. At the outset I want to acknowledge all of the hard work that has been done by principals, teachers, caretakers, secretaries and boards of management in all the schools. I thank them all and wish them well for the future.

I must return to the issue of school transport because I am not sure that the Minister realises the extent of the problem. There are many children who will not have school transport tomorrow morning or on Monday morning. I am continuously getting calls from parents about this. It does not matter to them how clean the buses are if their children cannot get on them. I am not putting all this at the Minister's door but I am putting it at her party's door because Fianna Fáil destroyed school transport in 2008 when it conducted a review of the system and since then further changes have been made by Fine Gael. I am shocked that the Green Party does not have a school transport policy which would ensure that every child can get a seat on a school bus. This nonsense of calling children "concessionary" or "eligible" has to stop and I ask the Minister to address it. I welcome information I received from the Ballina office which indicates that the national school buses site will be up and running again from next week. This needs to happen immediately so that the secondary school applicants are not blocked out.

I wish to draw the Minister's attention to a survey we conducted recently entitled "Telling the real story", in which 73.5% or three out of four young people said they did not have adequate support from their guidance counsellors. On Monday students will be encouraged to go to their guidance counsellors but if three out of four students have already told us that they did not get an adequate service from their guidance counsellors then we cannot be pushing them in that direction. The Department must make sure that the necessary resources are provided so students get an immediate response next week. Guidance counsellors must be there to support students, particularly the 10,200 students who are going to find that their grades are lower than expected as a result of the calculated grades process.

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