The Minister for Education has claimed that she fully intends on providing further funding to the school book rental scheme in the upcoming budget.
The news comes after children’s Advocacy group Barnardos issued a report outlining the current expenses that parents pay to send their children to school. The Education Minister Jan O’Sullivan has since responded by claiming that she would look to address the situation by providing further funding to help cash strapped parents, although she insisted the government would not be able to provide the €100 million that the charity openly called for. However the Education Minister insisted that she would argue very strongly in budget negotiations for further investment in education.
Ms O’Sullivan also said she completely understood that children returning to school was a stressful and expensive time for parents. Ms O’Sullivan also spoke of how she would to try to persuade the majority of schools who currently have cresting and branding on their uniforms to change their policy so they would be open to accepting plain style uniforms. Ms OSullivan also highlighted the fact that 94% of primary schools and 68% of secondary schools now have book rental schemes which is an area that needs to be improved to bring costs down.