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

I have seen data from Tusla, although it is no longer in education, on absences and suspensions. It is my understanding that this data are publicly available. The Education (Welfare) Act 2000 requires that Tusla be notified within six days. Tusla has to decide on its follow up. If there are deficiencies in the agency's follow up, we should not seek early recourse to the appeals mechanism which takes it away from the school and does not resolve anything. If there is a deficiency, we need to address it at school and Tusla levels.

In defence of my Department, a great deal of effort is being put into building well-being strategies and we will soon publish a well-being strategy, which deals with many of the issues surrounding behaviour and stress when something goes wrong and trying to build the capacity of the school to deal with that. We put all the additional resource we secured for the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, into the DEIS schools to strengthen their capability. I am certainly interested in examining other interventions that could help DEIS schools to manage effectively.

These schools have halved the drop-out rate in a decade from 32% to 15%. That indicates that they are having some success. We need to do more in this area and the interventions should relate to supporting the school to manage the drop out rate rather than to introduce an intervention in legislation, which I honestly could be counterproductive to implementing the bottom-up solutions that we all desire.