Ms Joan McCrohan:

Another point was that IMPACT facilitated information meetings. For two years we went around the country talking to special needs assistants about their role and the appropriate duties they should be carrying out. We always emphasised how important it was that they were not velcroed to the child, but promoted independence. The care they give pupils should be the same as they would give to their own children, otherwise they should be looking for a different job. We also emphasised that if they were working as a whole-school resource, taking on duties that should be assigned to the secretary, caretaker or cleaner, they were diluting the service they should be providing to a child with disabilities whose support was hard won from the National Council for Special Education, NCSE.

I plead with the NCSE and the Department that when they are devising policies on allocating support, they bear in mind that support is vitally important in infant stages and in formative years, particularly first year in secondary school. The support does not have to be visible but can exist in the background. If a child is not succeeding socially in infants, that child is not going to make friends and will have a very difficult time all the way up along. I have seen it happen. If the teacher is fire-fighting all the time because of a child's challenging behaviour, waiting to see if the child is going to settle down, and there is no-one to assist with settling the child and the whole class down, this can contribute to a bad outcome for the child.

In first year of second level, the special needs assistant's role is just to organise the child from a distance and make sure he or she is succeeding socially. These are the children who drop out of school and for whom mental health is a huge issue. They are experiencing a lot of change when they are just coming in to secondary school. Even if it was just for first year, I ask that there be consideration of this.