Ms Moira Leydon:

Go raibh maith agat agus tá mé an-bhuíoch as an ócáid agus an seans bheith anseo. I might just start off with a correction to the record. My good colleague here to my right is Ms Miriam Duggan, our president-elect of the ASTI, rather than vice president, and she will assume office at the end of August. It is a minor point, but it is important to have it correct on the record.

I commend, as usual, my colleagues in the INTO for their excellent, in-depth analysis. I have ten minutes allocated to me. We made a written submission that contains many very similar points, which I think speaks to the unanimity of analysis and recommendations that exists among the practitioners at both management and teacher level around how we move forward with making sure we have inclusive schools, buildings, etc. for students with autism. I will just make about three points that are more reflective of where we are right now, and perhaps we need to reflect on the pressing issues right now.

First, I will perhaps just set the scene. As someone who was around in 2003, 2004 and 2005, when finally the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act 2004 passed the Oireachtas and as someone who is very familiar with and has a background in special needs, particularly at the policy level, I really think that moment was absolutely critical. We are at a similar juncture now in terms of how our society responds to students with autism and, indeed, students within the wider special educational needs community. The latter is consistently rated as 25% prevalence within student cohort throughout most of, one could say, the developed world. Some 25% of all students are deemed to have special educational needs. The statistic for autistic children in the primary and second level cohort is 1.5%, which represents 14,000 students in the system in any given year. Therefore, we are talking about very large numbers of pupils.

We are also talking about a condition, which by its very nature, is absolutely heterogenous. Every student with autism is a different student to the next student with a diagnosis, which makes policy particularly challenging. It has to be very flexible and be very much based on evidence, ongoing analysis, evaluation and moving forward. The whole point, of course, about education and support is that the children who become the young adults are then able to live lives that are meaningful and independent and they are capable of contributing to society, including earning a living.

I think we are at a step change. Obviously, the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2018 was the major step. The invitation to today’s meeting included links to the two debates in Dáil Éireann from April 2019 and April 2021 and I read them in detail.

I was impressed by the language around students with special educational needs and people with autism having changed, profoundly, which gives us all hope that we can meet this challenge. The challenge is not insurmountable and it is not all about resources either. That is a considerable dimension of the problem, but it is not the only one. What came out in the latter debate in 2021 was that we want to be the accepting society. That is a good model for society to want to aspire to, in that we accept difference and diversity. That is the setting.

One of the issues of the day is the rightful anger and indignation about the fact that there are at least 270 children with autism who do not have a school place for September. That is outrageous. We also have the phenomenon of 15,500 children travelling outside their locality every day to attend specialist educational settings. A further 1,455 students are in receipt of home tuition, as a result of lack of specialised placements. Those statistics, incidentally, are from the recently-published report by the Office of the Ombudsman for Children. That report is critical because its focus is on places. It diagnoses the problem of lack of places as a lack of central planning, effectively, whereby demand cannot keep up with supply.

There are a number of dimensions to this. One is that the Department of Education has said that in the Irish education system, at both legal and cultural level, we have parents' choice. Parents have a choice about where to place their children. If there is a local service, but the parent prefers to have their child in a specialist location elsewhere, the parent's choice is predominant. Of course, that contributes to challenges, but it could be a cop-out clause. The biggest problem that the ASTI sees is that we simply do not plan sufficiently well in advance. With the guarantee of early childhood places, in particular, we have much more data about growing up in Ireland, the children coming through and the early childhood care and education, ECCE, sector. We have much more data than we have ever had before to be able to plan ahead. Unfortunately, that is not happening. I will not sit here and belabour and besmirch the good people in the Department of Education. The ombudsman's report has said everything. Central planning is failing to catch up with the need that is out there.

I will also pick up on a point that my colleagues at the INTO and others have made. We are very concerned about what I would describe as an emerging narrative that schools are reluctant to enrol special educational needs, SEN, students and that the problem lies at school level. I need hardly point out that the schools are highly-regulated institutions, which are regulated by law, policy, normative culture and professional ethics. We are operating in an environment in which a school that makes an admission decision on the basis that it does not have the capacity to enrol a child with particular needs, does so in full compliance with the regulatory environment in which it operates. However, it seems that sometimes, we blame schools for deficiencies at central level.

As a trade unionist and a part of the wider trade union community, the narrative of putting the blame on individual schools absolutely deflects from the wider contextual issues, whereby social infrastructure is not keeping up with a developer-led, market-based model of housing provision. New towns and suburbs and the beginning of cities are emerging and we simply do not have the schools, green places or primary care and public transport facilities. We really need to get the narrative right. This is not a case of individual schools making discriminatory decisions. It is a case of a social infrastructure not keeping pace with human need and demand, where we have a lot of evidence of such, because of the way we regulate and how we house and place people. I will not labour that point. I have made it very clear.

Trade unions are in the middle of pay talks. One of the biggest themes in those talks is the concept of the social wage and contract. What do we want from our society? One of the things we want from our society is respect. We wish for children to go to local schools and be with their buddies. We do not wish to spend hours in the car every day to get them there and back. When they leave school, they should be able to go to their friend's house for a birthday party. Unfortunately, the reality is that for thousands of autistic children and other children with high-level special needs, that is not part of their lives. We very much need to get back to basics and stop blaming schools for decisions over which they have no control.

The other issue which is utterly to the forefront for the ASTI, at present, is that of access to assessment and intervention. I carefully read the Dáil debate. The definition, which I like because it is simple and coherent, is that, "autism is a 'spectrum' condition that affects the typical development of the brain in areas such as social interaction, communication and sensory processing". The two characteristics of autism are its variety and its being lifelong. This very much places an absolute premium on making sure that we get assessment and intervention done at the earliest opportunity.

If a child has a lifelong condition which changes and varies over time and with intervention and the child does not get intervention until the age of six, when the period of up to three years old is when the brain is expanding exponentially, we have lost a considerable development stage in that child's life. I can very much see why the Office of the Ombudsman for Children is really harping on about this point. If we do not get assessment and intervention right, we will not make it. I will not quote the statistics about which the ombudsman's report was quoted with regard to time delays and the numbers on waiting lists.

We have all learned one thing, on which the politicians have given considerable leadership, in that when we had the pandemic, we pulled together. When we have the pandemic we pulled together. We made decisions overnight. We had money to make schools safe and to keep people's income alive and keep our businesses from going bankrupt. We have seen the same alacrity and capacity to make quick decisions on the Ukrainian refugee crisis. I cannot see why we do not have that capacity to respond to the current challenges, especially with autistic children, which is the business of today. Trade unions are very much in the business of finding solutions. We have capacity, past form and precedent. We can do this, but we really need to be clear about what needs to be done and get the investment rolling.

I will move on to building on what we call a strength and I will make a few recommendations to the members, who are the decision-makers. Sometimes we forget that only 2% of our special educational needs students are educated in specialist facilities. We have one of the highest rates in the world of students with special educational needs educated in mainstream schools. We know that, frequently, might mean they are in segregated classrooms on the same campus. That is where we are starting from. We need to go forward, but only having 2% outside of mainstream school is a considerable advantage.

One of the most devastating things I read about the displacement of young people in Ukraine was the fact that children with Down's syndrome and developmental disorders, and even dyslexia, are placed in institutions far away from homes and cities. I saw scenes of panic, chaos and mayhem and thought "oh, my goodness". We really forget how good Ireland is, when it comes to getting a little bit along the road, and then we seem to stall and do not get any further. Only 2% of our students are educated in separate facilities.

We were around this table talking about the framework for junior cycle many times. It was introduced in 2015. We have a differentiated curriculum of levels one and two and then we have junior cycle for students with a very high level of needs or a low level of needs. The reform of the senior cycle is prioritising the development of follow-on programmes. The inspectorate has a dedicated model of evaluation of provision, which commenced after 2017. It is already generating significant evidence about how well schools are doing in terms of meeting needs. What are the gaps in provision and what do we need to do?

The chief inspector's report, indeed, published earlier this year for 2016 to 2020 was broadly positive about provision and outcomes for students and, what is very critical now about the inspectorate focus is outcomes. Are these students learning? Are they thriving? Are they meeting the educational and developmental goals? We are beginning to learn a lot about what happens in the inclusive school. That is very important.

However, and I would not be sitting here representing the ASTI unless we had a however piece, we do not have training. When a new model of allocation of teachers to schools was introduced in 2017, the practice of withdrawing the child to the resource room to be taught by the specialist teacher was meant to end and the specialist teacher was meant to come into the mainstream classroom and co-teach along with the subject teacher. That was the ambition. It has not happened to the extent it was desired or envisaged. The reason is the training. There was no national training programme required. The entire area of planning for students with SEN is a complete fudge. Who will do it, who will follow it up, who will stand over it, who will record it and so forth was never worked out. There is also the area of qualifications and access to CPD, which the INTO has thoroughly gone into, and the time for planning. The biggest resource teachers have is time. That is their first resource. The second biggest resource is the time to do all the incredible work that they do.

In 2019, we did a survey on inclusive schools. I have brought it with me and I will leave it with the committee. It is very interesting, and I will finish on this note. It was done in Easter 2019, which was just before Covid-19. It gives some very good statistics on what is happening at second level. One of the areas I ask the committee to examine, and I am sure it has or will, is the fallout from Covid-19 and the impact on students with SEN, especially autistic children. I am sure some of the members had the experience of listening to the Joe Duffy radio show one week - I forget which year it was but possibly in 2020 - when families talked about regression in their children's lives and their families' lives and the chaos that was happening in homes because these children had no access to their daily education and daily routine. There is the issue of places and the issue of early and timely assessment and intervention. The third priority must be how to make up for that. For mainstream students we call it the learning gap, but we are talking about developmental black spaces for autistic students with very high needs. We need to put as much resources as possible into ensuring these children get to lead the lives they all deserve.

I am sorry, a Chathaoirligh, that I got carried away on a few points. I like to think the two unions have complemented each other regarding the elements on the ground and then the wider contextual issues. Please do not blame schools. They did not make the decisions about the resources they get. We need to look at the wider picture.