Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)
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Question 85: To ask the Minister for Education and Science if she will develop a national strategy to address low literacy levels, as recommended in the final report of the educational disadvantage committee of her Department; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [5750/06]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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This Government is strongly committed to achieving the highest possible standards of literacy for people of all ages. We see this as central to achieving our key objective of social inclusion and have put increased resources in place in recent years to this end. Targeted measures are now in place in schools, in the community and in the workplace to achieve this goal.

At school level, initiatives such as the Reading Recovery programme have been very successful. This programme enables intensive, individualised teaching to be provided to the lowest attaining pupils at an early stage, when intervention can be most successful. By focusing on identifying and assisting children who are having difficulty with reading and writing at an early stage, we can prevent literacy difficulties from becoming entrenched. The number of schools participating in the Reading Recovery programme has doubled in the past year and will be extended further as the new action plan for educational inclusion, DEIS, is rolled out.

Other measures in the DEIS plan which will ensure a major focus on improving literacy levels in disadvantaged schools include a new family literacy project and a targeted extension of the successful demonstration library project at second level. In addition, the 150 urban/town primary schools with the highest concentrations of disadvantage will benefit from maximum class sizes of 20:1 in junior classes and 24:1 in senior classes.

With regard to adult literacy, the Government's commitment to this area is evident from the fact that funding for adult literacy programmes increased more than 20 fold between 1997 and 2005 — from €1million to €22 million. Client numbers rose in the same period from 5,000 in 1997 to over 33,000 in 2004. The expansion of adult literacy services has included collaboration with FÁS to provide literacy training for people on their programmes, the development of successful workplace literacy initiatives and the organisation of community based literacy projects.

A comprehensive set of measures are, therefore, in place to promote literacy at all levels of the life cycle and the Government will continue to prioritise this area.