Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the guest speakers today and thank them for their contributions. With everybody else here, I welcome the opening of schools and I hope that they will remain open. We all know the impact the closure of schools had on many pupils. In many cases, students with special educational needs were disproportionately impacted by these closures.

I am concerned about the lack of information pertaining to children with special educational needs in the roadmap for the reopening of schools. There should have been a link with child development teams or the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, within the roadmap but that was not the case. A lot of therapies normally offered to children, such as occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and physiotherapy, were not offered during the period of the Covid closures or were only offered in a very limited fashion. In other years a transitional report would have been prepared with the student who was transitioning from primary school to secondary school and with the child development team. This helped prepare students for that transition and showed parents how to support them. This proved invaluable to schools. Are the witnesses aware of whether such reports were prepared with students this year? I believe they were not although I am open to correction. I hope I will be corrected on that. The report might include things as simple as where lockers should be located or that timetables should be colour-coded. Those things are very important, especially for children who have autism spectrum disorder, ASD. Will therapies now be offered on a regular basis, as they were before?