Joanna Tuffy (Labour)

This is a technical Bill and I will not go too far into its background, but as it deals with something retrospectively and ensures that something is not invalidated, as described in the memorandum, then I worry whether the Bill will be legally sound. I presume the Minister obtained full legal advice about it. People who are not experts about this can never know for sure and we are not experts in the Seanad on the level of technical, legal detail involved. I wonder why the relevant sections were not commenced when they should have been. That is the sort of thing we should ensure does not happen in the future. There is always a worry that legislation such as this cannot be challenged. With what it thought was sound legal advice, the Government has tried previously to do things retrospectively but has not succeeded.

I would like to raise a number of issues that relate to teaching in general, the first of which is absenteeism among pupils. The Minister of State's party colleague, Deputy Curran, put down a question about levels of absenteeism in the Clondalkin area. A total of 1,276 students in the area were absent for 20 days or more in the school year, which seemed a very high proportion of students in the area. It involved 847 primary school students and 429 post-primary students. Through my work as a public representative, I have found out about pupils who seem to have fallen through the gaps in the education system. They have been expelled from or left particular schools, but no alternative has been put in place for them. I am not apportioning blame to anyone, but some of these students might be out of the system for months. That does not augur well for their prospects of completing school. Very often, the child may have special needs or the child may experience domestic problems. The Government needs to do much more to tackle that problem.

I recently read a reply given by the Minister of State about the National Educational Welfare Board. A total of 61 education welfare officers and 12 senior education welfare officers have been employed. That is nowhere near the full complement of educational welfare officers. There is a great problem with absenteeism and much more needs to be done about that. There must be a more proactive approach to students who are falling out of the system. I dealt with such an issue in the last few days. Somebody unrelated to a particular child, but who was worried about the child, wanted to know what to do to get the child back into the school system. No one was available to ensure that the child was back in school.

A number of efforts have been made to provide alternative syllabi for the leaving certificate, such as the applied leaving certificate and other schemes. However, more needs to be done to provide flexible options for people who are at risk of dropping out at junior certificate or leaving certificate level. I am aware that the Traveller community has a problem in this respect. They need to be able to study for the junior certificate, but they may have to do it part-time so that they can work as well. However, to ensure that they keep a foot in the education system, we need to support them in a structured way. The classes should be provided for them during the day on a part-time basis and they could be given a training allowance to attend.