Mr. Adam Harris:

I will respond to some of the questions from Deputy Cassells. He asked where we have seen examples of a differentiation in quality. In the first instance, we have probably seen it at a very anecdotal level in that we do meet many young people and families who are having positive experiences in schools and who attribute that to the teacher in the class or the teachers in the school. Inversely, the organisation receives approximately 70 queries a month from families. Consistently, the top five issues are school issues concerning the support they receive within schools, the appropriate management of the resources Departments are giving them, engagement with parents by teachers and disciplinary processes. To give an example of the latter, if a student who is autistic experiences a meltdown during his or her school day, very often the policy that is being used to address that does not relate to support; it is a disciplinary policy and it deals with the person involved in the same way as it that deals with students who smoke behind the shed. That is a big issue. What we have been concerned about in particular is that while there is no doubt that a lot of students have very positive experiences, we are seeing an increasing number of students not attending school, not having access to a school place or illegally being placed on reduced timetables. That is consistently coming about fundamentally due to a lack of teacher knowledge. Schools are afraid to open autism classes because teachers do not feel that they have the training. Schools that have such classes or have students enrolled in mainstream classes perhaps are not in a position to support students as well as they could. That is central to it. We published a report in April that documented the cases of 313 children, whom we call "invisible children" who are currently out of school. That represents a very small example of the people in that position.

Another indicator that is important is when one looks at schools that have autism classes, there was a vision when such classes were established that students who enrolled in the classes in junior infants would increasingly spend more and more time in mainstream school as time went on. However, the evidence suggests that children who are enrolled in junior infants very often spend their whole education in such a class, which suggests that not enough is being done in reverse integration and slowly supporting students on the autism spectrum who enter schools. When we look at what happens to students when they finish school, while some progress to university, many find themselves in a position where they are very socially isolated because they have had negative experiences.

In terms of how teachers can manage the varied needs, fundamentally, what this comes down to is resources and then planning and differentiation. The courts have been clear through the years that people with disabilities have a right to an appropriate education and that an indicator for that, if one likes, is differentiation. I do not think that is particularly new in terms of what we are talking about because the established policy of the State is that in the vast majority of instances students with disabilities should attend mainstream school. The difficulty is that often while that is the established policy, schools then are not being sufficiently supported but also are not sufficiently regulated in terms of delivering the service. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities clearly states that it is never the case that a child needs to change or adapt in order to go to school, rather it is incumbent on member states and their agencies, in this case schools, to ensure that the service they offer is accessible.

This brings me back to mandatory CPD and the training relating to it. While I recognise that there might be a need for an evidence body for an overall mandatory CPD programme, if we do not have mandatory CPD, this is literally the equivalent of asking somebody who does not speak French to go in and teach a French class. Fundamentally, autism is a completely different way of doing and seeing things and placing a person without that knowledge and insight in a classroom is setting everybody up for failure. There is an evidence base for that. To return to language, there are current examples in the education system of non-verbal autistic children whose SNAs and teachers do not have the training to use the alternative communication styles they might use, which highlights the importance of this issue.