Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their honesty. I will address my questions first to Mr. Ward. I have encountered many cases of children with special needs who are having problems,. Mr. Ward referred to schools having programmes and so on. Is he referring to a national programme for schools or is it based on the fact that, as we all know, some schools will perform better than others, and it depends on the co-operation between teachers and principals with regard to better supports for children in schools?

The Middletown Centre for Autism came up a number of times. I was lucky enough to visit the facility last year with a number of Sinn Féin colleagues.

We had a frank discussion on this issue and the fact that it supports the industry, as we will call it. The reaction I received, however, suggested that the people in Middletown actually want to do more. They are chomping at the bit. The centre is co-funded by the British Department of Education and the Department of Education and Skills. The people there referred to how to "encourage" schools. That was a very cute word to use, but they were referring to encouraging schools through an accreditation system. It would be a case of inviting schools to state how many pupils they had and how many more were expected and then asking if there was a way to obtain assistance for those schools to upskill their teachers, without putting extra pressure on them.

As has been stated by previous speakers, this is an issue of resources and forward planning. What I understood from our visit to the Middletown centre, however, is that it has the system required to move this issue forward. We need the Government to buy into that system and to co-fund it. We will call it that. The positive aspect is that people want to do the right thing. It is a normal human reaction to want to help people in difficulty regardless of what is the problem. If a school is encouraged to help its teachers upskill`, the obvious knock-on effect is that the quality of school life improves for everybody.

In addition, with accreditation comes acknowledgement. That is something that is missing from many systems in this country. We do not acknowledge the good work that people do. Would the Department be interested in this? Reference was made to cohesion and to tying everything up. Is there a way that everyone can tie in to this? I am referring to linking in with the Middletown centre. There is a coincidence in the name because I am from Middleton. It is strange because Middleton was also called Middletown long ago. The Middletown centre is totally non-judgmental. It has looked at the sphere of education in a 32-county context in a very honest fashion. Would this be a way of achieving joined-up thinking? I ask that because we have seen that many organisations want to do the right thing but they are all doing things differently. My question concerns whether our guests would regard this as a way to tie things together. If this is the only 32-county autism specialist centre, could we not link up and link in the work of the education Departments on both sides of the water? I understand that there may be an impact as a result of Brexit. The Departments are already working together, however. Surely they can come up with a plan and I think the accreditation model would benefit everybody. What is the opinion of our guests?