Mr. Seán Ó Foghlú:

The overall conceptual idea for special education is to try to have as many kids in mainstream schools as possible. However, that is not an absolute. We have to be careful about that. We try to have an integration policy. We try to have the various supports in place as integrated as possible. We have put a huge amount of effort, in partnership with the NCSE, into ensuring that in terms of teacher allocations, rather than it being a decision made externally to a school, we give sufficient resources to the school to manage it and be responsive in a local context. We have a review on SNAs at the moment. I am not sure what the outcome of that will be, but we have hugely increased our investment in SNAs.

We want to encourage children to stay in mainstream second level education. We want to work with schools to put ASD units in place to enable that to be the case. With the NCSE, we are working with all schools to ensure that can be the case. It can be difficult in individual cases to find places at different times. That is one of the reasons we have a specific proposal in the Education (Admission to Schools) Bill to give the power to the NCSE to place a child with special educational needs in a school. That is an important proposal because we want to get through the difficulty of schools arguing, to a certain extent. We do not want to do that. We are obviously also working with Tusla. It has the responsibilities of the former National Educational Welfare Board with regard to children accessing schools generally.