Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to address the Seanad on how we propose to achieve the second goal that I have set out for our education plan. As Members will be aware, I set the goal that we would have the best education and training service in Europe within a decade. I have five goals but I do not propose to go into all of them now.

The second goal is to develop a pathway to ensure children of social disadvantage or with a special educational need receive equality of opportunity through education. I think this is an ambition we all share. The ambition to be the best in Europe in terms of our education plan is a way of changing the conversation about where we are and where we need to get to. It is important that we would have ambition in this field. It is fair to say that we are building on a base of good experience in this field. We have come some distance from the time when the State contested the right of a child with special educational needs to have an education within his or her service. We have come a considerable distance in that regard. The level of investment we now make in integrating children with special needs into our education system is very substantial, at €1.5 billion, or 20% of our entire education budget. We have developed good models for supporting such children through resource teaching, special needs assistants and so on.

We have also developed the delivering equality of opportunity in our schools, DEIS, programme which came into force in 2004-05 and builds on other initiatives such as Breaking the Cycle. The impact of this scheme has been very positive in terms of the improvements in literacy and numeracy in the schools involved. We have invested approximately €160 million in the provision of these supports across approximately 800 schools. This is a very significant investment that is delivering results. It is particularly encouraging to see its impact on reducing school drop-out levels, which have fallen from 32% to 17%. Some of my Fine Gael colleagues will recall that when the director of the Peter McVerry Trust came to speak to the party on how to tackle homelessness, top of the list was the need to end school drop-out. According to the Peter McVerry Trust what happens to a child during his or her early school years affects his or her later experience, which highlights the importance of this area.

We are also seeing significant improvement in the progression of people in our third level system. This is particularly encouraging in the context of the extraordinary pressure on resources in the third level system. There has been a good improvement in the participation of people coming from non-typical backgrounds. In addition, in the context of the experience we are building upon, according to the PISA figures, which look at the performance of Irish 15 year olds across the system, and the TIMMS figures which relate to the primary experience, one of the areas where Ireland is strong is in the performance of the lowest cohort in the class.Those children who have the most difficulty do better in the Irish system than they do in virtually all other European countries. Some of the high performers do not do so well in Ireland, but we are good at managing the weaker pupils compared with our counterparts. This is a good base, but there are no grounds for complacency or assuming that we have by any means delivered on the goal of equality of opportunity. We need to set out our ambitions, as I have done in the education plans, including the recently published DEIS plan and the new programme for allocating resource teaching, to continue improving literacy and numeracy among children from disadvantaged areas, to continue improving completion rates, which we hope to raise to the average level, to close the gap between DEIS and non-DEIS schools, and to have much stronger pathways of progression for people from disadvantaged or special needs backgrounds. These ambitions will go through our whole system.

The Leas-Chathaoirleach referred to our recent reform announcements. The first of two main announcements relates to the new model for resource teaching. This is a significant change. We employ approximately 12,500 resource teachers, who have largely been deployed on the basis of a certain amount of jam for every school, as it were, and a rigid diagnostic test whereby a child needs to have had a diagnostic test done before getting access to support. Often, children from disadvantaged backgrounds or schools in disadvantaged areas cannot afford that testing, which means that the resource is denied to children. The current model also results in an unnecessary and undesirable labelling of children as being of a particular category. We are trying to move away from that. The new model will allocate a resource much more closely to the profile of the school and the needs that it encounters. I am not just referring to the very complex and special needs of some children, but also to the general learning difficulties that children experience for all sorts of reasons. Each year this will see progressively more resources being made available to follow those children with the greatest needs. This is the right principle to guide how we disperse our moneys.

The same principle is behind our new approach to DEIS schools. Previously, the allocation of resource teaching to DEIS schools was based on principals doing a return. Whether returns were made or were collected at all was arbitrary. We are moving to an objective way of identifying schools with the greatest level of social disadvantage. It relies on CSO data on unemployment, occupation, lone parenthood and all of those factors that designate the level of disadvantage in a community. Our resource is going to follow the areas of greatest need. For the first time, we have been able to include 80 schools that have the greatest need but were not in the system after the first run. They meet the highest threshold. We recognise that there is a further spectrum of schools that have a strong case for support, but we need to refine our model. This will bring the system to a fairer point.

Regarding another major issue, we are trying to encourage on both sides a better deployment of the resource, be it into resource teachers for children with special needs or the DEIS programmes. We want to encourage a whole-school approach to the deployment of that resource so that a child is fully integrated. I visited Marino College, a school in my constituency, where we launched this programme. It was one of 47 schools that had been running the pilot programme. The way in which every staff member had bought into the importance of supporting a child with special educational needs was transformative. It was not some sort of withdrawal model that was solely an issue for the resource teacher and that child and with so many hours to be allocated over and above.Rather, they genuinely embraced the provision of support for the whole class. They used flexible approaches, with children taught in groups, mainstream classes and, occasionally, individually. It was a more integrated approach. The fact that the school leadership could deploy the resource more flexibly transformed the way in which it addressed special educational need in its school. I hope that this new resource model will, by putting the schools more in control of the way in which resources are deployed, transform the effectiveness of the work.

In the same way, we hope to encourage innovation in the DEIS programme. We have explicitly set aside money to encourage clusters of schools to work together and embrace pilots on leadership in schools, mathematics teaching and how schools relate to sporting and other organisations in their communities that make the difference between a child being successful or unsuccessful in a programme of education.

We are trying to deploy our resources more fairly and follow the highest priority children while also encouraging innovation at school level. I am constrained by time, but I will outline how we will support that. We are trying to examine what constitutes best practice in the deployment of resource teaching and the support of children from disadvantaged backgrounds within the school setting. We must entrust those at the coalface with greater ability to decide which programmes will be most effective for their children. Not only are we encouraging clustering and innovation, but also self-evaluation. Our inspectorate, which still sounds like the cigire of the past who came to a school with a red pencil to find fault, has transformed into a supporter of better practice, change and improvement within schools.

We cannot design a perfect scheme in Marlborough Street. It must be designed by those who are at the coalface, but we can support it by having exemplars of best practice and examining how the teaching model is being transformed internationally to make it more engaging, particularly for children who come to school without the same sort of preparation that others have because of the richness of reading and the like in their home environments. Fortunately, technology supports the transition of teaching from the old model, in which the monopoly on knowledge was held in the hands of the teacher and in the textbook, to one in which children have access to knowledge from all over the place. This is a question of helping to create an environment in which young people learn, build competences, learn to work with one another and learn to develop other aspects of their talents than just the ones that we tend to test in final examinations.

This is an exciting time in education. Fortunately, a little bit more money is coming back into the system and we can afford to undertake ambitious reforms. Technology is changing the way we deliver education by making it more accessible, particularly for children who come to the education system with more problems than others.

I thank the Seanad for giving me time to discuss this matter. Following the example of the Peter McVerry Trust, if we can crack educational opportunity, no barrier can stand in our way. We can break down communities of disadvantage and open significant opportunities for young people in terms of careers and success in public service and their communities. Education will be a pivotal investment in the coming years, given that we are encountering challenges in Europe, the US and the political system. We must ensure that we invest in an education that builds a strong and resilient citizenship that can deal with the many challenges coming our way.