My Department has spent more than €1.9 million on proposals submitted under the RAPID programme. This consists of €1.6 million on activities including capital projects, broadening third level access and adult and community education, plus €343,000 on once-off further education projects. It has given more than €5 million, under the Back to Education initiative to vocational education committees which encompass RAPID areas. It is not possible to desegregate this total on an individual RAPID area basis due to the difficulty in identifying the specific schemes that have been approved under the Back to Education initiative, as this is a matter for individual vocational education committees, as well as the portion of allocations under the school completion programme that relate to proposals from RAPID areas.
The current overall position regarding my Department's response to the RAPID programme is as follows. Some 28 RAPID proposals have been approved either in whole or in part at a combined cost of more than €1.6 million. This figure does not include a number of enhanced services for which a costing is not readily available, such as those that involve additional teacher allocations, additional teaching hours, increased access to psychological services, or in the case of capital projects, approval to progress to the next stage of architectural planning. There have been 28 proposals relating to early school leaving or homework clubs, located in areas where allocations have been made under the children at risk fund or where there are SCP "clusters" in existence. The SCP is the Department's main vehicle for funding proposals related to early school leavers. RAPID co-ordinators have been encouraged to liaise with the local management committees of the SCP in order to ensure that their proposals are integrated as far as possible into their cluster's retention plan. While a number of RAPID projects have been incorporated into SCP clusters, it is not possible to specify how much of a cluster's allocation is provided for those individual projects.