Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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240. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if she will provide the minutes from the meetings of the Dublin and Dún Laoghaire Education and Training Board over the past year. [36348/14]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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The minutes of the meetings of Dublin and Dun Laoghaire Education and Training Board requested by the Deputy are not provided to my Department. Consequently, I am not in a position to provide them to the Deputy.

Education and Training Boards (ETBs) are required in accordance with paragraph 9 of Schedule 3 of the Education and Training Boards Act, 2013, to ensure that minutes of each meeting of the Board are prepared; submitted for confirmation at the next meeting of the Board; signed by the person chairing the meeting at which they were submitted for confirmation; retained and open to inspection at all reasonable times by a person authorised by the Minister for that purpose.

There is no statutory requirement that a copy of the ETB minutes be routinely provided to the Department. Accordingly, the Department advised ETBs in February 2014 that they were not required to submit the minutes of each Board meeting to the Department and to discontinue the practice with immediate effect. However, ETBs were advised that minutes of Board meetings must be made available to the Minister if requested.

Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party)
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241. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if she will provide the most recent annual service plan and five-year strategy statement for the Dublin and Dún Laoghaire Education and Training Board. [36349/14]

Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour)
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Section 47 of the Education and Training Boards Act 2013 (the Act) requires that, following the receipt of provisional expenditure limits from the Minister, the chief executive of an ETB will prepare and submit to the board a service plan setting out the services that the board proposes to provide, and an estimate of income and expenditure of the board during the financial year commencing on 1 January of the relevant year. 2014 was the first year in which this process could have taken place and expenditure limits were issued to ETBs. However, Boards were only constituted in accordance with the requirements of Section 30 of the Act in August and September of 2014 and my Department took the view that it would be more appropriate to wait until the newly constituted Boards were operational before commencing the service plan process. Accordingly, it is intended that service plans will be in place in 2015.

Section 27 of the Act requires the preparation and adoption of s strategy statement by each ETB. However, this has not commenced to date in view of the significant work the ETBS have undertaken in 2014 relation to the amalgamation of the VECs and incorporation of the training function formerly undertaken by FÁS. I anticipate that the process of preparing strategy statements will commence later this year.