Ms Moira Leydon:

I am listening to and hearing what Deputy Funchion has said. I sense the frustration and possibly anger in her comments, which is very legitimate. What has precipitated this issue is that we now have a new allocation of teachers to schools, which as the Department has pointed out is a significant investment by the State. Unfortunately, unlike other initiatives, such as the junior cycle or Project Maths, that new model has not been underpinned by a training roll-out. It has not been underpinned by clarity of instruction as to where the roles fall. To be fair to the Department, it provided some clarification to us some weeks ago on who was expected to do the educational planning and how it might best be co-ordinated within the school context.

We now have a new model and a new inspection regime introduced in January 2019 to see how the new model is working. It will look at deployment of resources but more significantly it will look at learning outcomes for students with special needs. I think teachers got worried that we now have an evaluation model, which is a very serious process, but they are not sure how it works and, more significantly, they do not feel they have been trained sufficiently to be able to do the type of complex planning required. The planning is not just a sheet of paper. We are talking about a continuum-of-support model with a continual iterative process of review of the students' progress etc.

Those are the factors behind the advice issued to members. It is critical for all the stakeholders to sit down and work out a solution to the very clear-cut problems we have identified of time, training and co-ordination. Teachers need incentives to engage in this further learning. Because of its complex nature most of the training provided for special educational needs is at graduate diploma or postgraduate level and very costly to engage in. We really need to underpin this type of complex learning by teachers by enabling them to access these programmes of learning at little or no cost. I think there are very practical solutions to the impasse we are in, but we need to move on rather quickly. The word the Deputy used is appropriate. We need action.