Ms Áine Lynch:

I am very conscious of the fact that we are discussing the role of the SNA but it is very difficult not to go outside of that with some of the questions that have been raised. To respond to Senator Averil Power's questions, there are gaps elsewhere in the system. One of the difficulties is that the resources that are available to a school are SNA or teaching resources and yet children with special educational needs in the system may have therapeutic requirements that are necessary for their education and are not general therapeutic services that they will need outside of their schooling. For instance a child may need speech and language or behavioural therapies that are very specific to their education but that are not necessarily specific to the home environment. I think that is where the gap is. If a child with a particular behavioural difficulty, a speech and language difficulty or any other type of difficulty is in a school, one is faced with the choice of an SNA or resource teaching hours, neither of which will address the needs of that child in terms of accessing the curriculum. That is where the gap lies. It is not necessarily that we do not have enough resource hours or enough SNA people but we do not have the right resource for the child presenting in the school. Sometimes the confusion can be about linking the health service with the education service.

There are some specific therapeutic services that are specific to the educational system that do not exist currently. We see how the psychological service has become education-based, specifically addressing the psychological services within the educational context. There are other therapeutic supports that are needed for that as well. There are other gaps but the fact the school only has an option of a SNA or resource teaching support is one of the significant difficulties in terms of gaps. The SNA is seen as the most flexible resource, particularly because it is not capped, but even with the cap the evidence suggests it is the most prolific resource in the education system. Often the SNA is with children who have very complex needs. I gave the example of the behavioural issue. Having had personal experience of working with children in child psychiatry previously, I am aware that children would exit the mental health services and the following day they would be back in school. The mental health services have the most qualified professionals dealing with those difficulties and when the child returns to school the person who is trying to support that child is somebody who has no education or skills in this area. That is negative for everybody in that classroom system. It often then becomes a matter of containment; how does a teacher teach others in the classroom with this behavioural issue going on? Then the negativity around that child increases. There are gaps but I do not think we can talk about those gaps in respect of just talking about the role of the SNA. It is a much bigger issue.

There is emerging research around peer support but at a personal level I have seen the Portuguese system, where they do not have special schools and all children are in the mainstream system, with some special classes for children. They have quite a significant model around peer support. I have seen that work very positively, but I think we need more research to back that up.

We referenced the gap in information for parents. The guide from the National Council for Special Education was excellent and we were very supportive of it at the time, but there are guides for parents that are specific to education and to health, but the child is not split like that. When parents have a guide about what is available in the education system for their child, explaining the different resources, and their child needs something specific which is not in that guide, it does not make sense to them. It does not give them a clear understanding of where they are supposed to go. They need information about their specific child. Guides will help but they need to be linked and joined up as well so that parents can get that information.

There should be discussions on recasting the role but we need to be very careful because there are children who require care. We need people in the education system who can specifically address those care needs of the children. At present, the SNA system works extremely well in that care role. If we start saying that somebody who can address those needs very well can also have an educational role we are looking at a very different skill set. Perhaps there is another role needed in the classroom but I think moving the SNA role, which is addressing a very important need within the classroom, to something wider may not be the right thing to do. If we recast a new role within the education system, we need to ensure that it is child-centred and inclusive so it is not dealing only with children with specific needs but all the needs of the children in that classroom. We may come up with the teaching assistant role or the education assistant role and if that is the role assigned to the children with the most complex needs we are back into the system of the least qualified people addressing the children with the most need. Quite often those roles can be supplementary to children who are doing very well and need less support.

How we manage that new role, if there was to be a new role, would be very important. That addresses Deputy Ellis's point about very highly qualified personnel in the SNA role. We cannot create a national system based on that. If the SNA entry requirements are such and such then we need to create a system around that, not around the people who happen to find themselves in that role. There must be a baseline for what we are creating. In all walks of life one finds people who are over-qualified for positions because they chose to do the job. We cannot create a system based on that. The system has to be based on the entry requirement and perhaps we could find new roles for those people.