asked the Minister for Education if he is aware of a report (details supplied) that 3,000 itinerant children are not receiving any formal education; and the steps it is proposed to take to ensure that they benefit from equal educational opportunity with children in the settled community.

The report referred to was prepared by the National Co-ordinator for the Education of Travelling People, who works in close collaboration with my Department. The report estimates that there are 3,000 travelling children attending school with sufficient regularity to ensure that they can make some real progress—an increase of about 300 on three years ago. It states that the quality of the education these children are receiving has improved immeasurably owing to the provision of extra remedial teachers, special classes and pre-school classes.

Because of the nature of this problem it is difficult to obtain accurate figures of the number of travelling children who are not attending school. Nevertheless the report deduces that there are about 3,100 travelling children who do not attend school or who attend it only on a very irregular basis. These are mainly the children of unsettled families still living by the side of the road.

My Department, in co-operation with the National Council for the Education of Travelling People, will continue to press on vigorously with the provision of educational facilities for travelling children on the lines recommended by the Commission on Itinerancy. As the commission pointed out, however, progress will depend to a large extent on the success achieved by the community at large in settling the remainder of travelling families.

Could the Minister tell us what pressing on vigorously means in relation to the 3,000 children who are on the side of the road?

It means trying first of all to locate and count them and trying then to persuade them to enrol in the school and stay sufficiently long periods to get some benefit from education. We have, as the Deputy knows, a very dedicated group working in this field and they are getting every help from us, including remedial teachers to try to improve the quality of the education. It is very difficult, as the Deputy knows.

I welcome the Minister's concern about the difficulty of the problem but is he not perturbed by the fact that, according to his own answer, the situation appears, if anything, to be getting marginally worse rather than better over the years in terms of the number of children?

The fact is that hard statistics are not available in regard to those who keep moving. We have statistics for those who stay and who participate in the schemes available to them but we have not got statistics for those who keep moving. It is important that we should have.

Given that the problem is one involving itinerant children, who are itinerant in every sense of the word in that they are not of any fixed abode, would the Minister envisage, even on an experimental basis, a scheme of itinerant teachers? If the children cannot be got into the schools would the Minister consider appointing some teachers, on an experimental basis, to teach the children where they are?

I do not think that is a practical suggestion.

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