Ms Lorraine Dempsey:

Families and their children experienced a massive reduction in the availability of, and access to, professionals who deliver therapeutic interventions for children over the last few months. It is well known that the HSE had to redeploy a great number of staff to Covid swabbing centres. These staff included speech and language therapists and physiotherapists. These are the people who need to work directly with our children. While I am aware that returning these people to their posts is a priority, in certain areas it has been communicated that further staff may need to be redeployed to swabbing, particularly in areas where Covid is deemed to be on the rise. There is conflict between getting those well-trained professionals back to their posts working with children in schools and homes and carrying out such transition planning, and the need for the health service to react to Covid. At a previous committee meeting in June we said that, in whatever planning the HSE carried out, it needed to look at a permanent workforce relating to Covid to allow therapists do what they do best, which is to support our children.

On the transition plans which would normally be prepared in the early part of the year in which a child is moving from preschool to primary school or from primary school to post-primary school and on plans for school-leavers with disabilities, there was major disruption regarding the ability to contact teams, where a child had a team to provide such supports.

Schools have transition passports so information around a child's needs may have been provided directly by the parents, not necessarily by a health professional. There is a good passport for children with disabilities who are in receipt of access and inclusion model support when they transition from pre-school to primary school. That end was covered whether or not the related professional reports accompanied the passports and at least the teachers of junior infants would be well aware of the needs and strengths of the child coming into the classroom.

There was considerable disruption to the profiling process for children transitioning from schools to adult services. I know that we are talking about third level, further education, announcements and leaving certificate examinations but a large cohort of children who have left school this year face major disruption in their passage to what they will do in the course of the next few years and that needs to be addressed at another committee session.

There are existing waiting lists but we are looking for an increase in the number of available therapy staff to support schools. I believe the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, has managed to find a way around the redeployment of therapists with which it had engaged and has sanctioned the direct hiring of an additional 31 therapists. That one's resource can be taken away and used for something else shows that the system is not working during Covid-19.

In considering supports for children in schools, the education sector needs to look at directly providing special speech and language therapy. Getting teams back together is essential for continuity. Scaffolding supports around schools and children is now more crucial than ever.