Mr. Andy Pike:

I am sure Ms Kelly will have a comment or two also. We believe that at the moment one cannot really be certain as to what Government policy is for the provision of services to autistic students in mainstream. The Government endorsed the schools inclusion model, and part of that is a move towards the allocation of staff according to a new model called "front loading". That was due to be introduced at the start of this school year. There were reasons for looking at the introduction of front loading. There were many reasons it probably should happen, one of which is the move away from a student being required to have a formal diagnosis or to go through the assessment-of-need process to access supports from a special needs assistant. It moves the assessment into the school. Guidance was produced for principals, teachers and SNAs on how that was to be carried out but the Department decided not to proceed with that model. I believe that the reason was that the metrics they were using are showing that they had got people in the wrong place. To try to move people to the right place could not be achieved in the short space of time available.

The schools inclusion model itself involved 75 schools in the Kildare area in the main. Nobody has seen the evaluation report. The staff working in the schools just say to us that there is a sense of drift around it. The therapists were employed by the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, but they have had trouble recruiting and retaining staff. The way it was supposed to work was that therapists were not necessarily employed to provide therapies directly with students on a routine basis, although they would where the need arose. They were asked to design individual programmes that would be of assistance to the students in those 75 schools. They worked with the teachers and the special needs assistants around how a speech and language programme could be delivered in the school. It is the role of SNAs to assist with the delivery of such programmes. It is something that probably needs to be looked at in the very near future. We feel that if a family wants to give their son or daughter, who may be autistic, the best possible chance of getting the best experience out of an education that they would want to move them towards a mainstream place. Mainstream places are hard to get. The pathways from special classes into mainstream are just not there. The failure to deliver on the model for special educational needs in mainstream is a real problem. The guidance is still out there. Some schools are conducting assessments of students who present with problems. They may not have a diagnosis but the problem is that there is no way of matching that student with resources. There is no way of getting extra resources into the school. Some schools are doing those assessments but others are not because the whole system has not gone live. It was supposed to go live in September.

When they look at who they have and where they are needed, they have not done any assessments of where they need SNAs in mainstream classes since 2019. Consequently, many people will need to be moved from areas where there is no longer a need to a different school where there is a need. However, there is no way of moving them from A to B.

Going back to the question on July provision, we suggest looking at the work being done to welcome and accommodate Ukrainian students to our schools, of whom there are now 6,000 or 7,000 enrolled. The education and training boards, ETBs, on a regional level have co-ordinated the regional education and language teams involving groups of professionals from different organisations and have done that work really well. It shows what you can do if you ask the ETBs to deliver something. In each county there is an ETB. Instead of asking or begging independent schools to get on board with July provision, maybe the Government could ask the ETBs to make sure there is sufficient provision in their catchment area. They can instruct the schools administered by ETBs to run programmes; they cannot instruct a school that is run by a different patron.