Mr. Mark Devereux:

I teach one of the autism classes in Mount Sion Primary School in Waterford. We are a DEIS band 1 mainstream primary school with two autism classes. I set up my class in 2018 and have been teaching it ever since.

The first issue I wish to speak about is access, or lack of access, to assessments and therapists. We received 11 applications for places in our autism classes for September. Only one of these autism assessments was done by the HSE. The other ten were carried out by private professionals. Some of those are not up to standard, which is something we have come across over the years. It is ridiculous on one level that parents are having to fork out hundreds of euro, or thousands in some cases, to get assessments to potentially get a place. My other concern is how many families are sitting at home with kids in need of a place in one of our autism classes, but who cannot afford an assessment. It is not good enough. The difficulty of accessing assessments has been mentioned multiple times by the parents who have spoken.

Following receipt of diagnosis, things do not get any better. When I set up my class the HSE had the early intervention teams and the school age teams for therapy. In my first year in the class all the children in my care were dismissed from the early intervention team and placed on waiting lists for the school age team. That never happened. The year before last, Waterford transitioned to the CDNTs. As anyone with experience of the teams knows, things do not get any better after that. Just one child in my class has received a visit from a therapist in school in the past five years. I have children who have been waiting five years for therapeutic interventions from psychologists, behavioural therapists, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists. Some of our children have started to receive therapy because their parents have been hounding the therapy teams. I have begun calling the therapy teams and it was pointed out to me by one of the receptionists that if we flag, raise and seek to prioritise a case, the child will then get bumped up the list. Other families do not know this, so obviously they are not getting access to it. That is on some of the teams. With others we are left in limbo and told the child is on a waiting list and will be seen at some point, but when that will happen we do not know.

In fairness, I work with a fantastic team in school, including SNAs and other teachers, and fantastic families. However, we are not occupational therapists, speech and language therapists or psychologists. In the past five years, we have come up with plans for speech and language to help children who were not speaking to begin to talk. Other children have received assistive technology with a little support and we will develop plans to get the best out of them. It is similar with children who have sensory needs and so on. The parents, SNAs and I have come up with these plans, but we are doing them blind based off the little support we get, or off five-year-old plans created following a diagnosis when the child was three or four years old and non-verbal. It is just ridiculous.

In fairness to the therapy teams, when we actually get intervention from them the therapists are fantastic. They are doing their best, but there are just not enough of them. We are referring children and seeking to get support from psychologists. Before Christmas, the two psychologists on one of our CDNTs walked out. Children on that team have no access to psychology supports. With other teams, as was mentioned earlier, if a therapists goes on maternity leave, a child might receive one appointment or session before the therapist goes on maternity leave, and then they are back on the bottom of a list to wait until the therapist comes back from leave. It is not good enough.

As I said, families, teachers and SNAs are not qualified in these professional areas and we need the supports. From a school point of view, continuing professional development, CPD, and training are not up to scratch. All mainstream primary schools, on opening autism classes, receive one day of training in the first year for the whole staff,. That is it. Thereafter, it is up to the teachers in the classes. A person is only entitled to attend the training if he or she is in the class. We are allowed access CPD if we are lucky enough to gain access to it. Since we have two classes, we have 14 teachers between special education teachers and mainstream class teachers, dealing with the children in my and the other autism class daily through inclusion. They are not trained and have not received CPD. Some of them have entered the school since we opened up our classes, so they were not even there for the one-day training. Within the autism class, access to CPD is difficult and nearly impossible at some points. We use the TEACCH approach in our autism classes. There are two training programmes, with one taking two days and the other five days. I have attempted to get on the latter every since I entered the class and I am still waiting to get on it. In the other class we have had three different teachers and none of them have managed to gain access to the TEACCH courses in the six years the class was open. As more autism classes are opening, more teachers are seeking to access this training. The number of training places is not increasing, however. The NCSE tends to run one of these courses per year. Once it is booked up, that is it. You have to wait and make another attempt the following year. It is a lottery system most of us do not have a chance of winning.

The problem is that this is leading to failures for the kids. We have a lottery system for our children. They are lucky if they get into a class where the teacher is trained. Unfortunately, in certain circumstances, others are being placed in classes where teachers have received little or no training. That is clear from some of the experiences being described here. Teaching in an autism class is a completely different prospect to teaching in the mainstream. To be a mainstream class teacher you must complete your full degree or postgraduate degree, you must complete a probation period of a year where you are supervised by your principal, and all the rest. To enter an autism class you need only your qualification in teaching and you are popped in there. Perhaps you will be able to access the CPD and if you are not, then good luck to you. It is ridiculous. We are not allowed access the training before we enter the classes, so every new teacher in a new autism class is going in blind. They are going in off the experiences of the previous teacher and they are hoping to have a good support team in the school.

There is an autism-specific postgraduate course available for us to do. It is paid for by the Department, but to do it we must make ourselves available off site, out of class for between 15 and 28 days per year.

As any parent of a child with autism or anyone who has experience of working with autistic children knows, structure and consistency are key. It is not ideal for us to be missing that much schooling in a year, particularly if we are new to the class. There are other potential programmes out there. I paid more than €3,000 to do an online postgraduate course with DCU. This course covers pretty much the same material as the on-site course but it requires teachers to pay more than €3,000 of their own money to upskill. Surely if the Department is able to fund an on-site face-to-face course, it can fund the online course. This would result in better outcomes for children in that the teachers would be in school with them all year.

With regard to continual professional development for SNAs they should certainly have more access to training, particularly with the NCSE. Our SNAs play a key role in communication, sensory processing, regulation and overall knowledge of autism. They cannot access courses. They are not entitled to them. Teachers are able to avail of summer courses. Where I am from, there are no summer courses available on autism or any of the autism strategies we need to use. There are none for SNAs either. Surely some form of CPD training for the SNAs, even in the form of a summer course, would be ideal.

For the past number of years, for the summer programme, which used to be known as July provision, our school has run a very successful home tuition programme. We ensure that we match up all of the children in our school that need access to it with a teacher or an SNA. I am sure this is not the case for the parents who are in the room. I gather that it is nearly impossible for many schools in many counties to access tutors to carry out this work. The reason for this is very simple. The pay for SNAs is ridiculous. They take home approximately €10 an hour for home tuition. A newly qualified teacher with no experience or a mainstream class teacher with no experience of autism is paid more than double this for pretty much the same work on the home tuition programme. We have SNAs with more than 20 years of experience who do not engage in the programme because they cannot afford to do so because of childcare. It would cost them money.

Payment for teachers and SNAs has been mentioned numerous times in the Dáil Chamber. Last year we had teachers who engaged in the programme with us who were on temporary contracts and were not paid for the summer. They usually go on jobseeker's allowance for the summer. They were not entitled to do so because they were doing the home tuition and July provision. That was for ten hours a week and some of them were not paid until November. We have teachers who have childcare, rent and mortgage costs. They carried out work in July and August but were not paid for it until November or December. These are simple things that could be easily fixed to solve this problem.

School-based provision works for some schools and some children. In our school we find that due to the ratio of teachers and SNAs to children in the class, we can provide better opportunities for our children with the home tuition programme that we run. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep it going because of access to tutors and SNAs. This is due to simple issues that could easily be fixed.