Mr. Jim Mulkerrins:

Certainly it was true in the past that the classroom was such that teaching was teaching and teaching the child with autism was different but everything else was uniform within that almost as if the child with autism was inconvenient. A lot of work was done in this space around the introduction of the new resource teacher model in 2017 and it took many years to get us to a place where we could introduce that. The distribution of teachers was one small part of introducing the new model. The major part of it was changing the approach to teaching within schools, which now informs teacher training. Much of that was around the identification of pupils with additional needs and moving away from a model that relied entirely on a diagnosis because, frankly, a diagnosis of autism does not tell the teacher anything about the needs of the child. Every child with autism is different, as indeed is every child who is deaf, hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired or who has ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia. There are lots of different needs in there so it was very important that we would have a model that would encourage the school to have a better understanding of the learning needs of children and then develop planning.

We issued very substantial guidance to all schools and teachers around the introduction of that new model and also issued circulars around the distribution of teaching resources and what they would be used for. I will read one small part of it. Under the heading of additional teaching support in the 2017 circular for primary schools, it states that the classroom teacher in consultation with the special education teacher, as required, will consider ways in which the curriculum can be differentiated or adapted to suit the needs of individual pupils. It states that this may also involve identifying the most appropriate teaching strategies and programmes to meet the child's needs and deciding which additional teaching supports are required. It states that parents should normally be consulted as part of this process. That was a radical move from where we were where, essentially, the needs of the children were being negotiated between the parents and the NCSE and the response was "we'll provide a couple of hours teaching and some SNA support." This was now a discussion around the learning needs of the child in a way that did not really happen until then but is happening now and is informing the differentiated teaching practices of teachers. A teacher should now understand the learning needs of all of the children in the classroom regardless of whether they have autism, Down's syndrome or moderate learning difficulties. Teachers should understand the needs of children. They have the supports to work with them and should plan to teach the child in respect of those needs and plan in consultation with the parents. That is what our teacher training and continuous professional development efforts try to support.