Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. Much has already been said. We need to look beyond the reduced timetables. Other speakers have already mentioned why reduced timetables have become such a norm in so many schools. We need to look at pupil-teacher ratios. Teachers will say reduced timetables are being used because of the number of children they are trying to teach in a class. All of a sudden one disruptive child becomes a problem that needs to be removed so that the teacher can adequately teach the rest of the class. There is a major issue with classroom size and the ability of teachers to work effectively with children.

Based on how they are being used, if reduced timetables had existed when I was in school, there would have been very few people in my classroom. Something has gone wrong. Outside intellectual disability such as ASD etc., which is very widespread across all backgrounds, it is a socio-economic issue. The parents who are involved come from the most vulnerable families that one could meet. Irrespective of how much it might be written into guidelines, the power balance is not there. There are groups who have had a negative experience of the school education system. Travellers have negative experiences of the education system daily. Who effectively will advocate for a parent in this situation where they will say "No" to a school?

No matter how much we try to address the power imbalance in guidelines that everything needs to be black and white, there needs to be an advocate. There needs to be somebody, within the community or within the system, who is only there to support the family and the student in situations where this type of stuff is beginning to happen.

In Tallaght, there are two families that I support at present. One child has narcolepsy and that is why he is being sent home. The father rang me one day almost crying, stating that he does not know what to do. The child slumped in the classroom and the school rang for him to be taken home instead of waiting for him to come back around out of the condition that he has. They started sending him home every day at 10 a.m., one hour in, in secondary school. Now he has to re-engage. I will not name schools because it is not fair to do so. In another school, in west Tallaght, there is a child who has dyslexia, who has no behavioural issues and who loves school. They are trying to influence that child's mother to put the child on a reduced timetable because she struggles in some subjects in terms of dyslexia. This is how it is being used. There would be nobody left in the classroom if we were to keep allowing this to be implemented in the way that it is. We need to look at having a support service or a support person outside of the school community, not necessarily the school liaison teacher because he or she at one stage was a teacher in the classroom the year before or the year before that who, sometimes automatically, will understand why teachers feel they may need to do this.

When they report to Tusla, I wonder whether it is merely the filling of this form or is there some sort of supporting document? On ticking boxes, it asks whether there was parental involvement. How do we know what that involvement looks like for a parent and what support that parent received? Any school could tick many of the boxes on this form and send it off. It is not representative of the experience that the family and student have had over a period with the school. That is why I favour some sort of advocate who would exist within the Department or within the school system and who would be part of those conversations and a witness to the parental and student involvement in processes such as this. There will be medical situations. As the mother of someone on the autistic spectrum, I am aware there will be medical situations where it will be better for one's child to take him or her out for a period of time. I am talking about doing so for a few hours within one week, because a day is particularly difficult for sensory reasons and so on. I am not talking about six weeks, which is a long time. Consider how quickly one moves through a mathematics curriculum in six weeks. Sometimes a class spends a week in school on one part of the curriculum and it will have already gone three or four times' further along the curriculum than the child is able to catch up with. Parents in communities where there is high deprivation and low educational attainment are already under-resourced and cannot support their children at home to keep up with that curriculum. In many cases, the parents left school at 15 or 16 years of age.

I have one more question, which seems a little off-topic and has to do with children's allowance. Many children have been suspended or expelled from school over the past number of years and while I do not know where it came from, there is an idea that when one's child reaches 16 years, one must get the school to stamp a form to say that he or she is still in full-time education or one's children's allowance is stopped. This disproportionately affects working-class communities where on many occasions, because parents have refused reduced timetables their children have been expelled and the welfare system has come in and removed their children's allowance. Somewhere along the line, children's allowance, which was not set up as an educational payment, has been linked to educational attendance. It will disproportionately affect some of these families that are falling through the cracks in relation to reduced timetables, expulsions and suspensions. Such measures should not be the option but their families are also ending up in even worse positions than they were in because now they are attaching a social welfare payment to it. It is something the Department should look at. I do not know where that relationship originally developed from.

My main point is that there should be some sort of parent support worker or advocate who is engaged in any process that happens between a school and Tusla because of the distrust in institutions. When parents feel they have been targeted by institutions their whole life, it is difficult to go into a school and have a conversation with a principal in a suit. Parents end up agreeing with everything the principal says because they nearly feel inadequate to be able to put up some sort of advocacy for themselves and their children.