Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This section is on the way out of the Minister's Department and perhaps he will give us a timescale on it because I am not sure. In the meantime, the Minister has an opportunity to shape it. I have a view that there is a cohort of students who could and should have benefited from access to the school completion programme and particularly from access to the home school liaison scheme in recent years but have not done so because there has been no expansion of DEIS band 2 for more than ten years. An awful lot of schools would have qualified for it and many children could have benefited from the home school liaison scheme and the school completion programme. There was no real movement on DEIS in recent years. This is a crossover area and the Minister should engage with the Minister for Education and Skills to lobby for a review of DEIS with a view to expanding the number of people who can avail of these two schemes in particular.

Will the Minister also come back to me on redeployment? What staff are being redeployed and what work are they doing now that they have been redeployed? I presume the home school liaison teachers are still attached to schools and they are not being redeployed.

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