Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This is a common sense approach. We are carrying out the September audit of who is attending because research undertaken by my Department over the past number of months has shown that there is a real potential for impact of the three and half months spent out-of-school on children generally but, particularly, on children with special educational needs and from disadvantaged backgrounds. That is why it is so important, as we have this transition back to school, that TESS keeps a particular eye out for children who are perhaps most vulnerable. Rather than waiting for the biannual report audits to come in, we are doing the September audit to flag up if there are certain groups of children who perhaps might be falling through the cracks and to allow the home-school liaison officers or school completion programmes to kick in there to bring them back into the school.

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