Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to announce the supports for special education in this budget. We have a budget of €2.7 billion this year, which is a 5% increase on last year. It is 26% of the entire education budget. One of the challenges I have as Minister of State with responsibility for special education is to ensure we have sufficient special classes and appropriate placements for children with additional needs - either a special school place or a special class. One of the ways we do that is by securing sufficient SNAs and special education teachers. This year, we will have 745 extra special education teachers and we will also have 1,216 SNAs. By putting these staff in place we will be in a position to provide 2,700 appropriate placements across special schools, special classes and in mainstream. We should obviously remember that 97% of children with additional needs attend mainstream. However, we need to provide the staffing supports for those children in special classes and special schools. Of course, there are SNAs and special education teachers available in mainstream classes.

This year in particular I want to concentrate on special schools, which look after approximately 8,750 children across the country. These are children with profound and complex needs. It is a very challenging and difficult job. When I talk to principals and staff, they tell me they are in a unique position because they have a huge number of non-teaching staff, such as escorts and SNAs. We have therefore reduced the threshold of 15 teachers in a special school by which such a school can be eligible to have a post of administrative deputy principal. Instead of only one quarter of special schools having an administrative deputy principal, all schools will now have an administrative deputy principal in place. This will go a long way, and in an instrumental way, to assisting principals with leadership and management in special schools. This will go a long way to help these children. We will also have 100 additional posts for post-primary aged children in special schools. The majority of children in special schools, some 57%, are children of post-primary age. These 100 posts will help at the senior cycle. Whereas at present we only have a junior cycle syllabus and curriculum, we will now be able to put a senior cycle curriculum in place. It is not just about vocational and life skills, although they are important. We also want to see some sort of pathway at senior cycle for these children.

Finally, I will mention the summer programme. It was important that we had some permanency around the expanded programme. That has now been secured. It has been taken out of the Covid core funding and is now funded directly from the Exchequer under this subhead. I am glad that is there. We had 42,000 children who availed of that programme last year. We had a 50% increase in special schools participating in it, and a 20% increase overall in schools participating in the summer programme. We also had approximately 3,000 Ukrainians participating in the summer programme. It allows schools the clarity and time to plan for next summer. Part of the feedback they gave to us was that they did not have sufficient time to prepare. This will allow them to do that. We also put a new administrator in those schools to assist. I am pleased, on my fourth budget as Minister of State with responsibility for special education, that we have put a lot of work and resources into this. I hope it will help children with additional needs.

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