Professor Sue Buckley:

----- let me deal with the first part of the question. I am not an expert on all the funding of what goes on in all the different countries in Europe and it varies hugely. All sorts of things lie behind that, including attitudes to disability and the extent to which people have built special school systems and so on. As the Deputy might have guessed, it is complicated. A huge issue concerns the shifting of attitudes in some countries and consequently, people have done all sorts of things. Certainly, it was the case in the Netherlands and Belgium that large numbers of children had not been included and when they were, they were not well enough supported and consequently, it was only the most able who could make it. However, what tends to happen in every country is that this moves. Members should allow me to answer the dependency question and then link together these two things. I reiterate I am not an expert on the finances and probably should not go down that route, except to state that best practice in lots of countries would be what Ireland already has done, that is, to get a lot of money out through general allocation because one is talking about a large group of children with special educational needs of one sort and another. I think that has happened and holding back money has come to be for the most disabled group or the most educationally disadvantaged group.

On the issue of support assistants, the Deputy of course is absolutely correct. This is about best practice and my definition for them is they are there to help the child to access the curriculum and to encourage independence. They are there to step in when the child needs a little more help to maintain his or her attention. In our situation, they would be involved in differentiating the curriculum and helping the teacher to find more pictures and more material to simplify the curriculum. They may sit with the child in question or with a small group as they have a teaching role, albeit always under the direction of the class teacher. The child is the full responsibility of the class teacher, not the resource teacher and not the special educational needs, SEN, carer. Moreover, all these things can go wrong. A class teacher can leave it to the resource teacher if one is not careful and the way in which an assistant is used can be good or bad. As this growing army of assistants has come into being to help across an entire range of children, children with Down's syndrome are much more likely to have two or three assistants during the day or the week, which stops such over-dependency on a single person. Moreover, one has an increasingly skilled workforce and one can draw parallels with the health care system of having health care workers and nurses. One has a flexible workforce with varying degrees of training to deliver the service as effectively as possible.

To link this to the broader question, since we started to do this inclusion, I have worried a great deal about the 20% of the population that still gets out of school without adequate literacy and numeracy for the workplace. Right back at the end of the 1980s, I was going into classrooms and could see a child with Down's syndrome who had an IEP, professionals coming in to support him or her and an assistant sitting with him or her while quite clearly, another four children in that class also needed the same level of help. I would like to think this is how we have moved, because we have become less stuck to the child money but have built up a flexible workforce. We know the 20% in question and can tell at the age of four and five who will be the ones who will fall behind with literacy and will become socially and educationally disadvantaged. We also know, from lots of studies, that if one quickly puts in the right sort of one-to-one instruction, particularly in respect of literacy, some of them catch up within a term or two. They cannot crack it from whole class instruction for a variety of reasons including poor attention, delayed motor issues and so on.

It struck me more and more that we should have this big vision in mind because the other experience I will share with the committee that might answer some other questions - what I have just described is real - is that going into classrooms and realising that, and then seeing the assistant paid for by the child with Down's syndrome actually helping that small group. We often see that in a primary classroom, that the children who need extra help have already got grouped and this extra person who is helping them.

These are real stories. On our first children to hit the secondary school, we got in touch with a big local secondary school two years ahead. It had 1,800 children, was historically a grammar school and was proud of its academic record. I went to see them. I telephoned the head and asked did he know there were two girls with Down's syndrome in feeder schools. "Yes", he replied, "I had heard about it. Come and see us." This was the early 1990s. The guy said to me, "I have been here four years. I have really invested in special education. Come and meet the head of learning support. I want every child who comes through here to go out able to go to work." He meant that 20%, mostly boys, who we know make up 90% of our young prison population. They come from the children who we have failed in the education system - this is relevant to those worrying about Down's syndrome. He said, "Meet the head of learning support. We have three full-time teachers in our learning support team and 18 assistants, and we can use those flexibly." The assistants could go and support a child in the classroom, do individual work, do small group work and be training up teachers or helping teachers adapt material for a pupil, and they would be supporting the individual education plans. The learning resource area in this big secondary school was part of the main school library. Trying to get away from the stigma, one could have a gifted child doing his or her homework in there or a child needing extra help, and yet anybody in the population could have individual needs. That school did not bat an eyelid at taking two very different children with Down's syndrome because it already had the attitudes and resources in place. Does that make sense?