Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the delegation and have two brief questions. I am out of the classroom for as long as I was in it, but I was in the classroom for ten years and had a particular interest in special needs education. I would be interested in learning what Professor Buckley thinks about children with special needs moving out of the classroom for one-on-one teaching. It was the bane of my life when I was a teacher and I took some awful chances when I look back at encouraging parents to let their children stay in the classroom. I would give them extra help and think it worked in a number of cases. However, I know one cannot be global in something such as this. It is an issue I have all the time.

I have found today's presentations fascinating and say "Well done" to all of the contributors across the board. It has been very enlightening. This is a simplistic way of putting it, but putting another 1,000 SNAs and another 2,000 resource teachers into the system is not the solution, which was where we were coming from in previous discussions. While politics will pull and drag at both sides of that argument, we need to look at what we do and the way we do it. That is why I welcome the NCSE looking at allocation and assessment and how it allocates accordingly. This is being done after 20 years, but it is being done nonetheless. To be fair to us as a country and society, we have come a long way in dealing with special education challenges.

In the absence of the committee being able to do anything in reclassifying children with Down's syndrome as low-incidence, which the Minister seems to have said will not be possible in the short term - I presume there are good reasons for everything - what is the first short-term solution to what we are talking about? Would I be right in trying to distil it to the argument that every child should have an IEP? Do we in Ireland have the same arrangement as that in the United States? Is it the case that every child with Down's syndrome should, by law, right and common sense, have an IEP? If there was a pot of resources somewhere, would it be directed towards making more assessments available with a view to having an IEP? There are many resources that are not being used and directed as they should be. Tradition has more of a say than educational need and right. In respect of where we would like to see movement, should we try to push in the short term because parents of children in the system today will not benefit from the NCSE's re-evaluation of how it assesses and allocates? Should we push for more assessments at NCSE level? Would that be a productive solution?