Professor Sue Buckley:

Autism is more like one in 100 children, not one in 500. The birth rate here for children with Down's syndrome is near one in 500 because there is no screening or termination. That will not be precise but it is something like that. Internationally, we are talking about one child in 100 with autism. That includes the whole spectrum so it includes high functioning children with Asperger's who may have an IQ of 140 and in the past would have been thought a bit eccentric but will now have a diagnosis of Asperger's. There is a significant variation in the incidence of those conditions, which was the reason for my slightly out of order comment that one could cut a little bit off that group - a quarter of an hour of resource - and have more than enough for the children with Down's syndrome. It is a bit odd how it ever came to be like that.

Returning to Senator Power's broader question about general allocation, I would not set myself up to be a general expert on education systems. One must have some way of identifying the level of special educational need in a school. There is a school census system in the UK. I am not quite sure whether it is every term or twice or once a year. It is basically a tick box and takes in how many children there are with specific conditions like autism or hearing impairment. We have had a system of waves of extra help. If one was in wave one, it was minimum and if one was in wave two, it was a bit more and it also included wave three. Schools were rating their own children on level of special educational need. None of these things is perfect but that would be a relatively sensible way to go about it. Again, we should be able to train and trust head teachers and teachers not to cheat the system.