Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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Question 595: To ask the Minister for Education and Science, in view of the high drop out rate of students from disadvantaged areas, her plans to introduce new financial supports to leaving certificate students to enable them to finish their studies. [5699/06]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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My Department's policy to combat educational disadvantage and early school leaving is designed to include related and complementary strategies to improve participation rates and outcomes in mainstream school. It is also designed to provide second-chance education and training for those who left school early without any qualification. The problem of early school leaving requires movement on a number of fronts, including legislative and curricular reforms and preventative interventions, which is the approach that my Department is taking. The Education Welfare Act and the establishment of the National Educational Welfare Board are important planks in the campaign to keep students at school and will provide a comprehensive framework for promoting regular school attendance and tackling the problems of absenteeism and early school leaving.

With regard to the curriculum, my Department's strategies include widening the educational experience available to students. It aims to achieve a greater level of inclusiveness in curricular provision and meet the diverse needs of second level pupils, by expanding funding for programmes such as the leaving certificate vocational programme, LCVP, vocational preparation training, VPT, and the leaving certificate applied, LCA.

The school completion programme was implemented to directly target those in danger of dropping out of the education system and is a key component of my Department's strategy to discriminate positively in favour of children and young people who are at risk of early school leaving. In line with current thinking, it favours an integrated cross-community and cross-sectoral approach based on the development of local strategies to ensure maximum participation levels in the education process. It entails targeting individual young people aged between four and 18, both in and out of school, and arranging supports to address inequalities in education access, participation and outcomes.

Youthreach is a national response to the needs of unqualified early school leavers in Ireland and targets young people aged from 15 to 20. It is designed to offer a programme of integrated general education, vocational training and work experience. A training allowance is payable to participants at different rates, depending on age. A similar programme in a culturally supportive environment is operated for Travellers in a network of senior Traveller training centres.

DEIS, Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, the new action plan for educational inclusion, will put in place a standardised system for identifying levels of disadvantage in our primary and second level schools for the purposes of qualifying for resources, both human and financial, according to the degree of disadvantaged experienced. This standardised system will replace all of the existing arrangements for targeting schools for participation in initiatives to address disadvantage. The new action plan aims to ensure that the pre-school to completion of upper second-level educational needs of children and young people aged between three and 18 years of age from disadvantaged communities are prioritised and effectively addressed. The identification process for the new integrated school support programme, a key element of DEIS, is nearing completion and selected schools will be invited to participate in the programme shortly.