Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Like others, the Labour Party will be supporting the Bill. I echo the sentiments of Senator Warfield regarding the school completion programme. I also commend the community homework clubs that are operating all over the country. I will focus my remarks on the budget negotiations that Ministers are completing at the moment. It is very clear that Covid-19 has disproportionately affected vulnerable students. Educational welfare officers and home school liaison officers in constituencies such as mine have found that kids are either not coming back at all or have had to be provided with massive levels of support. Last week the Dublin Economics Workshop discussed research conducted by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, IFS, the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, and Trinity College Dublin, TCD, that looked at the impact of school closures and the responses that policy makers such as the Minister could make in order to mitigate the impact on our most vulnerable students. In their contributions, researchers said that over the course of the pandemic there was evidence of a widening of inequality, which affects our more vulnerable students, and of significant learning loss. They also said that there were future challenges coming down the line in terms of high stress arising from unemployment of parents, particularly as the PUP is phased out and some industries do not come back.

My party colleagues, Deputies Bacik and Ó Ríordáin, have been campaigning for a catch-up fund for children in order to alleviate the worst effects of the loss of learning over 18 months when schools were closed. Unfortunately, the Government recently announced that €50 million has been allocated towards this, which equates to just €50 per child to make up for 18 months of disrupted learning. Compare that to the Netherlands, where €2,500 has been allocated per child. In the UK, the Tories have allocated £1 billion, equating to £85.47 per child. While that amount falls far short of the £3.5 billion that the Education Policy Institute in the UK calculated was needed, it is still much more than we have provided. We know that educational disadvantage and inequality does not just last for the course of a school year but lasts a lifetime. We also know that investing in children early, often and intensively reduces later rates of problems such as crime, unemployment, addiction and family breakdown.

The Bill before us is a technical one dealing with allocating responsibility for things that would naturally fit within the Department of Education and with Tusla personnel who would naturally be dealing with people who are employed in that Department. I ask that the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and the Minister for Education negotiate intensively for the allocation of a catch-up fund for children of at least €100 million because the last 18 months might have a lifelong effect. It is important that the State makes up for the 18 months of disrupted learning, especially for those children who did not have access to computers or data and who were sitting at home in freezing cold flats and houses trying to continue to learn. My niece is a home school liaison officer in a school in the inner city and she has been dealing with the impact of that every day since the children returned in September.