Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Education is the great leveller. Education should be an opportunity to give every child the ability to reach his or her potential. It is so important that, as a country, we make sure we have equality within the education system for pupils themselves and for parents. The information that I am getting back from a large number of schools at the moment is that there is a crisis first of all in being able to access teachers in general because of a shortage of teachers in a number of different areas, but my understanding is that this is particularly acute in the context of children with additional needs and special needs within schools.

I have an example of a school in my constituency that is renowned for its work in terms of inclusion and providing services for children with additional needs. That is so much so that parents have moved from different parts of the country to the locality because the school works so hard to be able to provide the best education to children with additional needs. It is an incredible situation that because of their work, they have managed to raise the standards and the outcomes in the school. Many parents have glowing reports of how their children have come on in that regard. The Minister of State can believe it or not, but even though the school has an increasing school population, it is to have a reduction in the number of special education teachers. In a response she gave to a parliamentary question, she indicated that some schools got an increase in special education teachers and others had a reduction but, in the main, those that had a reduction were schools in which the population was falling. This school falls into the 10% of schools in areas where there has been an increase in population, yet there was a reduction in the number of special education teachers. The difficulty here is that some of these appraisals are being made by the Department on the basis of the averages of the school outcomes, but different pupils in the class have far different levels of ability and need far more help.

We have this crazy situation where schools and principals are struggling to get the necessary supports. They are getting two and a half hours here and two and a half hours there. Special education teachers are spending their day driving from school to school to fill in those small little gaps. Schools are being forced into the appeals process, which is a full-time job in itself. I talk to teachers who tell me they are spending weeks working until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. completing forms for an appeals process. The appeals process only looks at pupils from junior infants up to second class and, incredibly, ignores the pupils in the latter years of school. Some of the junior pupils cannot even get appraisals because the system is so log-jammed. One parent of a child in junior infants was told they would have spend €2,500 to get an assessment for the child.

The system is grinding to a halt. I do not believe this is just a bureaucratic issue. There is a funding issue and a recruitment issue at the heart of this and, as a result, schools are suffering significantly. There are many parents with children who, if they had the inputs that were needed would be able to develop far more successfully, who would be able to reach a greater potential and would be able to enjoy and achieve far more in life, but the Government is actually taking that resource, which is having a material effect on each of those individual lives and their families. I implore the Minister of State to look at the schools that have been battling to try and get special education teacher resource and to do her best to make sure that they have them without this constant battle.

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