Ms Martina Mannion:

I thank the committee members. The Minister of State has already outlined the steps the Department is taking in the area of regression and the supports being provided for children with special educational needs in order to get back to school. One of the key messages is that the Department is acutely aware that being out of school has an impact on all children, but has a particular impact on children with special educational needs. In returning children to school, getting those children in special schools and special classes back has been the priority.

As regards regression, when schools reopened in September, the Department worked very closely with stakeholders to provide guidance documents and supports to schools about how best to provide for children on their return to school and to support any learning loss that had been identified. There are over 13,000 special education support teachers across our school system and children with special educational needs have learning plans that identify their particular learning needs. Those teachers have worked closely with the class teachers and the special education teams in the schools to ensure that children who had particular challenges on return to school could be best supported by the allocation of those teachers to the children who most needed them. That, supplemented by the programme the Minister of State has identified as the supplementary programme and our summer programme, is what we can do currently to support those children in the area of regression. As the committee has clearly identified, this is an area of which we are acutely aware and we are working very closely with the stakeholders to get everyone back. Once they are back, we are targeting learning loss in particular. Members will also be aware that when children first returned in September, our strategies were very much about settling back in, targeting areas of particular loss and picking up on key skills to allow children to bed that in before they moved on to building on that learning. That will be the focus again when children in special schools, special classes and mainstream schools return.