Ms Angela O'Neill:

We envisage that the preliminary assessment will meet our statutory obligations but the further assessment would be delivered as part of the child service statement. The Disability Act is an administrative process and is not at all child and family friendly. Our preference is for children and families to access timely and comprehensive assessments without going through the process, if at all possible. It is huge for a family to be asked to apply for an assessment under the Disability Act when they are just getting to grips with the fact that their two and a half year old is not communicating well. Our preference is for children and families to access timely and comprehensive assessments through the children's disability network teams. If they never had to use the Disability Act, that would be brilliant. We feel we can meet the statutory obligations to determine whether a child has a disability, what its nature and extent are and what the health needs are arising from the disability based on a preliminary team assessment.

We should not focus on the 90-minute issue because, following engagement with Fórsa and professional bodies, there will be a much wider time range. The Disability Act per sedoes not require us to provide the diagnostic assessments. The three-month timeframe for an assessment can be clinically inappropriate in the context of autism and it might be better for a child to attend a disability network service and have a diagnostic intervention which arrives at an ASD diagnosis over a much longer period. The Act can tie us up in knots that are not child and family friendly.