Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman. I completely concur. Obviously, the pandemic was extremely difficult for all children but particularly for those with additional needs.

On contingency planning, as far as I am aware, the Department is part of the Government task force and there will be work done in that context. The Chairman is quite right that the impact of school closures on children with additional needs was really disastrous. They were not in a position to learn adequately remotely and they needed it to be in person. I will outline some of the schemes that we put in place. We put together the supplementary scheme back at Easter, at a cost of about €10 million. We expanded the summer provision to double the funding to €40 million, and we also had a huge increase this year for eligibility. The Ministry, Deputy Foley, also mentioned the Covid learning and support scheme, CLASS, programme valued at €52.6 million. This will help a lot of these children to catch up. Obviously, there was going to be a clear risk of regression for these children. I have also announced the review of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act, the EPSEN Act, which is the statutory legislation underpinning all special education. That legislation is now 17 years old and some parts of that Act have not commenced at all. We are setting up a steering group and an advisory group and we hope to go to a public consultation very shortly on that to get views in relation to tit so we can, as the Chairman has said, take those learnings from what has occurred over the past two years. If we have another situation in the future, and please God we will not, then we can make sure that these children with additional needs are catered for.

We must bear in mind also that the Government did put the needs of children who had additional needs first and foremost in terms of going back to school, above and beyond anybody else. The children who have some sort of additional needs only take up about 20% of the entire schoolgoing cohort anyway, so we should not be unable to do that for them in the future.