Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

There has been a huge amount of work done by the Departments of Children and Youth Affairs and Education and Skills, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and other bodies in regard to transitions and the importance of transitions for children with disabilities. For this particular cohort, whether they have Down's syndrome or another syndrome in the context of which an intellectual disability arises, it is very important to plan that transition. These are children that would have had supports in preschool under the access and inclusion model which my colleague mention and which is led by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. That transition has been broken since March. It would have involved children visiting their new schools and work with them on changing and getting ready for the move from their local preschools into primary schools. It is very disjointed now. The fear families have is that their children will have a huge amount of difficulty settling in come September.

In a general sense, what the Department needs to focus on for all children, but especially those with disabilities who are transitioning into primary education, particularly mainstream primary schools, is the transition package. It needs to come up with resources that all families and all schools can use, especially for the first three months, in terms of getting children back into school. In the absence of guidelines, we do not yet know what schools will look like in the autumn. However, schools will need support to bring children who have had that six-month gap in their education at an early education level into a school building where they may or may not be social distancing, where there is a much more rigid environment than in preschool and where the numbers are generally much greater. What we need is a system response for all children, with the cohort of children with developmental delays being the subject of a particular focus.

I do not think it is something we can do individually as families or, if we are lucky, with a team around us. The system needs to respond to what will be a much broader problem with children come September.