Mr. David Duffy:

I thank the Deputy for the question. On the medicalised model, there is general acceptance now almost 20 years after the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act, EPSEN, that the medicalised model is not the way to go. The TUI has had discussions with the Department of Education, the National Council for Special Education and quite a number of the disability rights groups. Indeed, we have made submissions to the Oireachtas committee on education about what might be an alternative way forward, where we do not end up putting impossible responsibilities on schools or creating an expectation by parents that schools can do something they are not legally mandated, able or resourced to do, that could provide a better model that does work.

My colleagues have more than adequately covered the school inclusion model. We simply do not know what the report on the model says. We look forward to seeing it. We have asked to see it and await it. On what was said about occupational therapists, OTs, speech and language therapists, SLTs, and so on working directly with students as well as a trickle-down or cascade model, we would strongly argue and have argued that the same should apply to the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, programme. Students need one-to-one support from NEPS. Trickle-down or cascade has an element of validity about it but it needs to be much broader than that.

I may well have taken up my Fórsa colleagues wrongly and my apologies if I have. I would just say on the reference to Réalt and to ETBs, which is generally working very well, I have a fear it is not just about ETB or DEIS schools in the context of support for special needs, it has to be all schools. There has always been a little bit of a fear, particularly in the ETB area and among DEIS schools that they are the first to try anything. It needs to be much broader.

In response to the Deputy's original question about what we can do, as Deputy Carroll MacNeill has said it is such a broad thing to deal with here in respect of autism. If I could boil it down to three particular areas where we could make things better, and of course I am leaving out a lot of other important areas, one is prompt access to assessments and, second, is planning for places years ahead of when we need them. We cannot plan that exactly so of course there is going to be a little bit of flux. However, we have a pretty good idea years ahead of time, particularly for post-primary as to where we are going to need those services. There also needs to be prompt access to in-school and out-of-school supports for students, families and schools. All three of those things have to be done, at least in the initial stages, at a national level. The individual school cannot fix that.