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

Research the Department has undertaken on the Covid-19 pandemic has shown the risk of a particular impact on students from disadvantaged backgrounds and students with special educational needs. This is one of the reasons I have been very committed as part of the Government to the reopening of schools generally.

As the Deputy knows, the Tusla Education Support Service, TESS, operates under the Education (Welfare) Act 2000 and has an emphasis on the promotion of school attendance, participation and retention. TESS has three strands, namely the educational welfare service, the home school community liaison scheme and the school completion programme. All three of these are working at present and Tusla has been engaging on this point to ensure engagement with all students, in particular students with those additional needs, so they are brought back into education.

As we discussed in debate on earlier questions, to ensure this is happening we have the special September return being made by all schools to indicate whether students have returned after the extensive gap forced on them by Covid. TESS staff will examine these returns to see whether particular issues need to be addressed.

TESS has planned a universal response to support the return to school for all students and has reorganised the focus and capacity of the service to achieve this, including by temporarily seconding additional support staff from other areas of Tusla to support the initiative.

The 122 school completion projects are funded in line with the academic term and approximately €24.7 million is provided to them each year.

The home school community liaison scheme is supported by the Department of Education and Skills and falls directly within the remit of the Minister of Education and Skills.

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