Ms Derval McDonagh:

I thank the Deputy.

I agree with her that inclusive education is the cornerstone and the foundation of an inclusive society. If we start with children, resourcing and investing in inclusive education, that will reap benefits beyond what we can only dream of. Ms Lavin spoke beautifully about her experience in school and the lack of guidance she experienced, and how that led to a lack of employment opportunities, ambition and vision. I believe that we need to invest in education and in an inclusive education model. That takes vision and courage. Sometimes inclusive education can be seen as this polarised space where it is about children fitting into boxes and where there are special schools and special classes as well as mainstream. It is as though we are all vying with each other. When you bring people together into a room and have the courage to have a conversation about that, we are looking for the same issue, which is the highest quality inclusive education for children. We know we are a long way off it. Ms Lavin rightly pointed out the many issues currently facing disabled children. We have contact from family members on a daily basis. It would break your heart to listen to some of the stories. A dad contacted us recently who had applied to 30 schools for his son. We can all expect to apply for two or three schools and maybe one of those will come to pass. You might not get your first choice but you will get something locally. This is 30 schools. Many families tell us of their experience of only getting their school place at the very last minute. That comes down to data, planning and better investment over time. We need to see that from the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, and others.

With regard to investing in inclusive education what we found with our inclusive education conference was that one of the words that stood out was "trust". There was agreement in the room that in an ideal world everyone would love their child to go to my local school with their brothers and sisters. That should be the normal thing that happens in 2023. However, those families told us that they could not trust that their children would get the individual support and help they would need in the local school. They are pushed into making decisions that involve the child going to a different school that is located an hour and a half or two hours down the road. We must invest and build trust with families and individuals about getting the required support. We in Inclusion Ireland have called for a multi-annual vision on inclusive education and building towards that step by step. We know it is going to take time. We are not oblivious to that. It is going to take time and investment to get there. However as the ombudsman said, every decision we make should be working towards that, decreasing that polarity, coming together and saying “What do we as a society want in terms of inclusive education? What are we trying to build for people?” I agree wholeheartedly about that foundation work around inclusive education.

The Deputy also mentioned CDNTs and resources. That is a chronic issue facing people at the moment. Inclusion Ireland has had conversations before about this. It is not the model of progressing disability services, PDS, that is at issue. Nobody can argue with fair and transparent access for children to services and supports. The unfortunate issue is that the model was not invested in before it was rolled out. There were waiting lists before it and those waiting lists have been compounded. Now we are seeing a third of those teams vacant. How can they possibly hope to support children in the way they need to be supported? If the model was resourced properly and if we build towards that then children should get support in an integrated way whatever environment they happen to be in, whether that is school or at home. The model should allow for that. Unfortunately, because it has not been invested in and because the resources are not there, it is difficult for anybody to get the support they need. That is a real shame.

I do not know whether there is a quick-fix solution for that. It will take slow and steady working towards better and taking our obligations seriously to resource those teams. For our report in February last year we had more than 1,000 families respond to a survey. They told us about their experience of PDS. At least 50% were not getting any service and 85% were waiting for longer than a year and a half to get any contact. Some of these are children with the most complex needs. There is not a therapist in the country who goes to the trouble of training and doing four years in college, who wants to work just within that kind of environment, working with waiting lists and saying "No" to people.

The therapists within the system genuinely want to be there to support people, but they do not have the resources right now to do that. That is a significant issue. We had a number of recommendations in our report. The top recommendation was about workforce planning strategy. We really need to see an integrated workforce planning strategy if we are to see any hope of improvement over the coming years.

To respond to Deputy Tully's final question about the autism strategy, no, we are not on that group. We were not invited to be part of it.