Mr. Jim Mulkerrins:

The Senator asked if NEPS was moving away from assessment and the answer, clearly, is "No". The intention is that NEPS will continue and, as it develops over the course of the coming years in line with the commitments made in the programme for partnership Government, retain a significant assessment role. What it will be moving away from is assessment simply to inform the allocation of resources. That is clearly better and fully in line with the recommendations of the NCSE and its 2013 policy advice and the Stack report in 2014. This will be true for the HSE also. The HSE has indicated to us in the past that it uses approximately 125 whole-time equivalent psychologists just to carry out assessments for educational purposes. Clearly, those resources will now be freed up to carry out clinical assessments in order to understand better the clinical needs of children and to provide the necessary therapeutic interventions. We regard this as a very significant positive.

I was asked about the need for IEPs. We have had ongoing conversations with stakeholders, including school management bodies, and have moved significantly in the direction of IEPs. We included that in our 2014 special needs assistance circular. There is robust provision in the new model for planning for the needs of individual children and for that planning to feed into the annual reporting to be provided to the NCSE. We have not hung our hat on any language around IEPs. While we have referred to it as "personalised pupil planning", the Department is kind of indifferent at the moment about what it is called. Many schools do it already, as has been acknowledged by the questioner, and the chief inspector has said that the Inspectorate has noted in a number of whole-school evaluations that schools which carry out individual planning for children tend to be those which have the best outcomes for children. As such, we know that a lot of good work is already going on and that planning templates are available. Our colleagues in NEPS have planning templates that they provide for schools. We are not, at this point in time at least, being directive in terms of what a plan should look like. What we are concerned about is whether it is the right plan for the child and has been developed in consultation with the relevant people within the school and the parents of the child so that everybody knows the efforts that are going to be made on his or her behalf. As to whether we need to do anything in terms of EPSN for this, we have taken significant strides in terms of getting it into schools. Having it underpinned legislatively would not necessarily improve that situation.

I was asked whether the NCSE would provide up-to-date costs on the introduction of EPSN. It is our view, based on the advice we have received, that we cannot implement EPSN piecemeal. We cannot take the IEP section of it and implement that without implementing all of the rest of it. Implementing all of the rest of it is problematic as it is expensive. The costs are not just for the Department. In 2006, when the estimate was made, the projected cost was approximately €235 million for the Department and approximately €500 million for the Department of Health.