I thank you, Acting Chairman, for the opportunity to raise this important matter on the Adjournment. Many vocational education committees, including County Kerry VEC, have recently been informed by the Department of Education and Science that it will not provide financial support for participants in VTOS, Youthreach and Traveller training centres for child care in the current year. These savage cuts mean that second chance education and training opportunities will be denied to unemployed adults and early school leavers in the 2003-04 school year.
Equality in education, for which this Minister, Deputy Dempsey, has become the self-proclaimed Messiah, is once again being undermined by that same Minister, especially for the educationally disadvantaged and, in this case, particularly women. The allocation for child care grants this year has been cut dramatically by 37% on last year's allocation. These savage cuts were not announced publicly. Instead the Department of Education and Science informed vocational education committees about their budgets for the new year and vocational education committees had to pass on the news to their VTOS participants. All the VTOS participants and Youthreach schemes in Kerry received was a three line memorandum outlining the changes.
In County Kerry, for example, 128 students are involved in seven VTOS, four Youthreach and two Traveller training centres. They are based in Tralee, Dingle, Killarney, Listowel, Killorglin, Cahirciveen and Kenmare. What does the Minister have to say to those people who entered their courses on the basis that child care would be available to them? Child care funding will not be available for school going children. What will these participants do when their children are at school? They will have to abandon their classes as they are not in a position to pay for private child care. This will strongly discourage anyone with school-going children from entering education.
I refer to a letter I received from one participant in VTOS. This group of women tell me they are in the second year of their course and will now be unable to finish it, thus rendering their first year of study null and void. As these students rightly point out, these cuts actively discourage women with children from participating in courses, which is discrimination against women, especially women with children.
These cuts will undermine the purpose for which the Department introduced child care grants in 1998, which was to encourage women with children to engage in the training courses on offer and to help them to go on to further training and enter the workforce. The cuts will compound educational disadvantage in this State. Many students who have already signed up for courses will not be able to take up these places in 2003 without child care support. Students who commenced courses last year will not be able to continue their studies if vital child care funding is not restored.
We, as a society, actively encouraged people, particularly women, who could do so to take up places on VTOS courses in County Kerry and elsewhere in the country. The Government is telling them otherwise and is breaching that contract made with them when they began their courses. I ask the Minister to explain to the 128 VTOS participants in County Kerry, whom I represent, why he is preventing them from entering education.