Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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110. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of additional home school liaison officers and educational welfare officers her Department will provide to schools across the State for the 2025-26 academic year; the number of unfilled posts currently; the funding and recruitment processes she intends to provide to fill new and existing vacancies; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [31224/25]

Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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The DEIS programme is a key policy of the Department to tackle concentrated educational disadvantage at school level. The Tusla education support service, TESS, is under the remit of my Department and has three strands: the statutory Educational Welfare Service, EWS, the home school community liaison scheme and the school completion programme. These all work extremely well and support a huge number of students every year.

The scheme is an important support under DEIS, promoting partnership between parents, teachers and community family support services. All DEIS urban primary and all DEIS post-primary schools are included in the scheme. It is delivered by 528 full-time home school liaison co-ordinators, who are teachers in these schools and assigned to these duties either in individual schools or in clusters of schools. None of those 528 posts are currently vacant. The primary role of the EWS is to ensure that every child either attends school regularly or otherwise receives a certain minimum education. Educational welfare officers are based throughout the country and work with children, young people and their families who are experiencing difficulty with school attendance. The main priority of the work is around the educational welfare of children and to ensure that concerns around attendance are addressed before attendance becomes a crisis issue. Currently there are 153 EWOs operating across the six Tusla regions, including 23 EWOs who provide services to the most vulnerable children, such as children in care, and five temporary EWO posts allocated to trial innovative approaches to supporting attendance. I have met them. They are people who literally go out and stand outside children’s bedroom doors to make sure they are supported to come in to school. They do really excellent work.

A national EWO recruitment campaign took place in February 2025 from which all vacant EWO posts are currently being filled. All of the posts are filled or being filled. The funding is there and we need to make sure they are in place where they are not as soon as possible.

Any increases to overall capacity will be considered in the context of the budgetary process in my Department. We have spoken a lot about the DEIS programme and a new DEIS plan. This is about making sure we keep what we have that works well. I cannot commend enough the work of the home school liaison co-ordinators, teams and the educational welfare officers. What we need is more of them and that is very much my intention.

Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein)
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To conclude on that point in the interests of time, I agree entirely with the Minister that is where the focus needs to be. We talk about school completion and absenteeism. The work done by home school liaison officers and education and welfare officers is incredibly important and life changing for individuals and families. It is about breaking the cycle. The Minister will have the absolute and full support of this side of the House if there is an opportunity to expand those services and supports for children because they make such a difference.