I am grateful for the opportunity to address the committee on the recently announced cutbacks in funding to the school completion programme. The invitation to address the committee is a welcome opportunity to put on record some of the good work carried out in 124 projects throughout the country which work with 25,000 of our most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people.
I commend the wisdom and foresight of successive Ministers for Education and Science since 1997 in seeking to help those young people most at risk of early school leaving. I particularly commend the action of the Government in establishing the school completion programme in 2002 and expanding it by 50% in 2007. This is a good example of an effective education policy. The words of President Kennedy must have been heard in the halls of the Department of Education and Science when he said, "The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining". However, it would not seem very wise to abandon completion of these repairs just when they are needed most, when the rain has begun.
As members will be aware, the social inclusion unit of the Department of Education and Science wrote instructing all school completion programme projects to make a 3% cut in payroll and seek any further savings that could be achieved. These cuts caused us some alarm. First, we had been led to believe front-line services would be protected from such cuts, and ours, as members will hear, is a front-line service. Second, the effect of the announcement of cutbacks has been to demoralise a group of highly dedicated and professional people whose commitment to the needs of the young people they serve is extremely high.
This presentation is about numbers, statistics, case examples and programmes, all of which in themselves are valuable. However, behind all of this data are real people with real families living in real communities, people who are as important as you and I, but who, because of the way our society is arranged, have been given an unequal share, and who also, perhaps because of unfortunate choices, have found themselves caught, troubled, lost and on the margins. Behind each of these statistics there is a real young person, a story, a mystery and, possibly, untapped magic.
The early school leavers initiative, the 8-15 programme as it is known throughout the county, began in 1998. Since then, successive Ministers for Education and Science have entrusted me and my colleagues in the school completion programme to get to know these young people, to listen to their stories, to genuinely care for them, to look out for them and to value them, doing our best not to let any form of prejudice cloud our approach or judgment, and when there is a need, to challenge them in a professional and humane way.
The school completion programme has a great strength that few other policy initiatives in education have been lucky to enjoy. It is a locally devised solution to local problems. School completion has, at its heart, a flexibility to respond to local needs and an ability to devise and implement the best solution in a given place and time, rather than impose a "one size fits all" approach. It is this local approach which allows us to be flexible, responsive and adaptable to the needs of young people. While there are common approaches and much work has been done to develop and promote models of best practice, each project around the country devises its own retention plan. The school completion programme also is unique in being the only programme that works directly with children and young people.
The main aims of the school completion programme are as follows: to retain young people in the formal education system to completion of the senior cycle; to improve quality of participation and educational attainment of targeted children and young people in the educational process; to bring together all local stakeholders within the home, school, youth, community, statutory and voluntary sectors to tackle early school leaving; to offer positive supports in primary and post-primary schools towards the prevention of educational disadvantage; to encourage young people who have left mainstream education to return to school; and to influence in a positive way policies relating to the prevention of early school leaving in the education system.
Thus far, the school completion programme has been a great success in the approximately 600 schools that participate. It therefore was a great disappointment when cutbacks were announced in late August. In response, our branch executive has written to the Minister asking him to reconsider making cuts in such an important service. We also have been monitoring the impact of these cuts and the differences they are making. The cutbacks currently being implemented and any future cuts will have a direct effect upon the young people targeted for support under this programme.
I am in a position today to report on some of the effects of the cutbacks to date. From our survey of branch members in respect of how local programmes are coping with funding cutbacks, we have found that several themes recur.