Ms Ruth Gilhool:

Many parents from disadvantaged areas take out loans from the credit union or borrow from family and friends to get the child assessed privately. After a couple of years of waiting, where nothing is progressing in the child's behaviour and development, they feel they have no other choice. They will sell belongings on DoneDeal to get them done.

With regard to the comment that schools have the highest number of SNAs ever, what is written on paper is not necessarily what happens on the ground. One of our cases involves a child who is six years old and has extreme anxiety. The child has gone to school for a week since the beginning of April and has been signed out of school for anxiety reasons. The SENO visited the school while the child was out and carried out a review of the three hours of SNA time per day that the child had. Without any consultation with the parent or seeing the child in the school, the SENO took the hours away from the six year old. We have so many cases where we are finding that since the allocations were changed for SNAs and for the resource hours, the children being signed out of school are getting younger and younger. If one asks the Department of Education and Skills, one will not get the right numbers for the children being signed out of school because to be granted home tuition for those who are lucky enough, the children have to be still registered in the school so the school still gets the capitation money for that child. There is money floating around there somewhere and it needs to be investigated.

On the parenting classes, some are ASD-related and some are not. We only attended one.

The DCA Warriors were not consulted on the SNA resource hours allocation scheme. We are known to speak out on behalf of our members; perhaps the invitation got lost in the post.

I would like to have an investigation to find out the amount spent by the HSE on administration of interventions and assessments of special needs versus the amount spent on the assessment and the interventions given to the children because it appears that all that has changed is an increase in paperwork.