Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As the Chairman said, this petition went back and forth for analysis. This is rightly so because all parliamentarians meet parents in their constituency clinics who are trying to access services for their children. In that respect the response from the autism advocacy organisations was informative because they stressed the most important issue is being able to access the resources when needed. They state that students can access autism classes in both national and secondary schools, and that schools will make provision for an autism class when requested to do so. That is correct, but the issue is that the back up support must be timely. That is the aspect that parliamentarians find most frustrating.

The advocacy organisations point out that 86% of autistic children attend mainstream schools, yet the SNAs require no formal training. I welcome their participation which was helpful to the debate. I thank the petitioners for raising this issue and opening up the debate between the Department of Education and Skills and the advocacy groups. That has been worthwhile.