Professor Sue Buckley:

As members know I will be online at 3 p.m. on an international website so I have to keep my eye on the clock. There is an overlap in some of the questions so I will start at the beginning. If children are put into school without adequate support, the most common outcome is that they will drown in the system. They could become quiet and not learn very much but just stay there. Most children with Down's syndrome do not do that. If they cannot cope there will be behaviour issues. As soon as those arise they are out of the system. It will be said that they behave like that because they have Down's syndrome, not that they are behaving like that because they cannot cope and we are not properly supporting them. They may manage but they will not make the academic progress of which they are capable. Most of them will not manage without adequate support. They will fall behind, teachers will not know how to manage the curriculum and there will be behavioural issues. Then they will be moved out. That is the pathway.

We are talking about a range of children. We have probably made several of the points linked to the questions members have asked. Members probably heard me mention support hours, not resource hours. They are two separate things. The resource hour allocation of five hours would probably be fine. Some children may not need that much because we would be assessing them on that statement. Very disabled children might have 30 hours of teaching assistant support because they need someone to meet them when they arrive at school and when they leave. That is because we have had children with quite profound and multiple disability go right through the school system, including secondary school. That is the absolute maximum a child might get but that is an assistant, to make sure they are safe.

We do not allocate teaching hours in the way it is done here. Across the whole range another child with Down's syndrome might have only five hours of support assistance. Typically it is something like 20 hours for most children. That support person could be doing anything from care needs, helping them to attend in the class, small group or one-to-one teaching, preparing materials, working across the range of extra help that child needs. The model is that a teacher who is an expert in Down's syndrome may come from outside. We still have special education advisory teams. They would be likely to come every week and their role is training and consultancy and there is the special education person inside school. That is somewhat flexible. They could have teaching hours allocated. The short answer is that the five hour resource allocation would solve the immediate problem.

There needs to be a discussion about broadening the role of support assistants. I suspect that members will find it is going on anyway. The people in the schools are intelligent adults, they learn how to work in the classroom. I suspect that is happening but I believe there are union issues around that and so on but I will not get into that area. It is a question of balance. The resource teacher will not be there when a child's attention wanders and cannot keep up in the lesson. I agree that more data needs to be collected. All systems are different. We do not have resource teachers. Ireland has different pockets of expertise that have worked in different ways. Everybody’s cultural, community expectations and approach to running schools is different. Ireland needs to collect its own research data.