Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In respect of the guidelines on transition due to be published, one of my bugbears with guidelines is that some schools will implement them very well and some will not. We have seen that with guidelines issued in respect of bullying and mental health problems, some schools are excellent and some are not so good. When guidelines are published, there must be some oversight of how they are implemented. The witnesses might tell me who will be responsible for that. Will it be the teachers, the principals, the boards of management or will the NCSE have some role?

I know a child who has dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, Asperger's syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. He is aged nine and the assistive technology he uses has totally transformed his educational potential. He feels confident and part of the class. He does a lot of his work on an iPad. There are many apps that will highlight words and read them back. One of our concerns is that when he moves to post-primary school and sits State examinations, there is no guarantee that he will get a reader or a scribe for those examinations, even though he started using assistive technology in third class, on the recommendation of the psychologist in consultation with the parents, the student, the principal and teachers in his primary school. Those parents face the dilemma that when he gets to that stage, he may not qualify for a scribe and a reader. That is a huge worry for them.

It transforms the way he is learning and improves his educational outputs before he gets to a State examination. I am sure we have all had people make representations where they have been refused access to a scribe or reader, despite having one in the lead-up to a State examination. That area needs to be given more priority.

The idea of a passport system is excellent and I have advocated it for a long time. We should get students for transition in fourth and fifth classes and not just sixth classes. In larger urban areas we also have the difficulty of the choice of schools that can be accessed. The Louth case is one example but we have schools in Cork city that do not have special classrooms and the schools that have them are over-subscribed. There seems to be no planning between primary and post-primary schools. In a primary school setting, we know how many children with special educational needs are in a particular locality and so why are we not looking at the post-primary setting in the same locality. We should know that in five years there will be X amount of students coming into the post-primary system and we need to put in places the resources now rather than leaving it until a student is transitioning from sixth class, only to find that he or she cannot access the services or resources because they are not in place. That does not make sense.

Resources should follow the student and it should not be a case that when a student reaches sixth class, the resources available at primary school end for that person and he or she must go through a process of applying all over again for what will probably be the same level of resources at post-primary level. We should be moving to a system where the resources transition with the student. One of the difficulties with many children in special educational needs is that they need to build a relationship with teachers and special needs assistants but the relationship stops at the end of primary school. They have to rebuild the relationships again at post-primary level, which can be very difficult and detrimental to a child's educational outcome. These are some of the ideas we should consider.