Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

A few of the Deputies raised the issue of affluent parents 'queue jumping' - I believe that was the expression. This came up in the report on special education provision in 2013, and the phrase 'affluent parents' has been used quite regularly since then in relation to assessments. It is a misnomer, because all parents from all socioeconomic groups were trying to find methods to privately fund assessments. It was not just affluent parents. The St. Vincent de Paul was actually helping individual parents to pay up to several hundred euro for psychological assessments, because the parents knew that the overall impact on their family of their child not getting support in education was significant. It was not just rich parents who were trying to obtain private assessments and paying for them. It was all parents. I would like to put that notion to bed.

Senator Healy Eames and one of the Deputies asked about special needs assistants and diagnosis being needed. It should be clarified to avoid confusion, especially for any parents who might be reading the transcript or listening in, that a diagnosis is not needed for an application for SNA support. The needs of the child, though, and the care needs, have to be expressed in the reports and assessments that are sent in with the application. There are children who will never have a diagnosis for the conditions that they have. They are children who would be classed as having syndromes without names. There will never be a diagnosis, yet they might have significant physical care needs, for example. A diagnosis is not actually needed. In some respects we are now looking at a system of teaching allocations where diagnosis will not be needed either, thus taking away pressure.

Deputy O'Brien made reference to the fact that while we are potentially moving towards systems in education, and actually moving towards systems in health, where a diagnosis will not be necessary in order to access supports, it is important that there are still pathways to diagnosis for children. Although diagnosis will inform teaching to some degree, children should be viewed as individuals. Their needs should be assessed, not necessarily whether they have autism or ADHD. Those specific diagnoses have been used to put our children into boxes and if they do not tick the box on the form they get nothing. We have always advocated for moving away from the box-ticking.

Deputy O'Brien referenced several diagnoses. In order to get to grips with what this proposed model is, it is necessary to take off what I would refer to quite frequently as 'disability blinkers'. Do not look at the specific diagnosis, but look to the range of needs within diagnoses. Every child is an individual. Parents will recognise that when they get more familiar with the system. Hopefully communication with parents and educators about what this will mean for their children will alleviate some of the concerns. We are moving from a system where the child has a label and he or she gets X number of hours towards a system where the child's needs are being met. He or she may not necessarily get a prescriptive number of hours and that is something for everyone at this meeting to understand. That special allocation may not be a specific number of hours. It may instead fluctuate throughout the school year depending on the child's needs. It may be two teachers working together within a classroom or working with that child in a group of children. It is a fluid system whereby the schools themselves and the teaching team will hopefully be able to assess the varying needs of the children and how those needs fluctuate depending on different difficulties that arise with the individual children. No children remain static, and their needs never remain static. We hope that the model will allow for that flexibility to meet our children's needs.

On teachers not having that extra level of special educational training, a study found that about 50% of the overall teaching body - 60,000 teachers - did not have additional special educational needs training.

This is a cause of concern. Some teachers will learn when they have good teaching support teams around them, that is, peer learning within the school environment. The teaching profession already assesses children's learning needs, so this other assessment will not be entirely new. As regards assessment tools, being able to differentiate the curricula further and meeting the challenging needs of some children, there should be ease of access for teachers to training and an examination of how it is delivered, especially to part-time teachers. For example, there could be more web-based training. Training in respect of special educational needs, for example, behavioural support, could also be rolled out to special needs assistants. I am not referring to direct education or training, but SNAs currently do not have the luxury of receiving any training that would help the entire school body to meet the children's needs.