Ms Martina Mannion:

The teaching posts are allocated to the individual schools and it is a matter for the schools to recruit the teachers as they would do in the normal way. I do not believe that there will be any challenges in dealing with this. These are teachers who will be interested in working in the area of special education. Particularly at primary level, there should not be any particular challenges in those areas. Obviously, at post-primary there are separate challenges, particularly in relation to, for example, subject specialists but it should not impact in terms of special education teaching posts.

In relation to the SNA allocation, the additional allocations have not gone out to schools yet as we are working through that allocation process. We commit each year to have those SNA allocations to schools in May and we intend to be able to provide those to schools as quickly as possible.