Ms Martina Mannion:

I thank the Deputy. He covered several areas. He referred to child psychiatrists but I was speaking about child educational psychologists. He referred to schools not co-operating with us and how we work with schools to ensure they open the provision. I will ask my colleague, Mr. McLoughlin, to speak about the work we have done in that regard, including the new legislation that was brought in last year, in terms of the education components.

As regards staff recruitment, recruitment of educational psychologists is ongoing. There have been very positive numbers applying for the posts and those applications are being worked through the Public Appointments Service. Those people will be in the system this year. As we will always be replacing people who retire or leave their post for other reasons, there will continue to be gaps, but we are happy that the campaigns have been positive. We are getting good feedback and good people in the system and working there with us. The NCSE has a significant amount of recruitment ongoing. It is filling its vacancies. It had SENO vacancies but it is filling them. It has a new recruitment campaign coming on in the summer for those new additional posts. It will be a big difference and people will start to see it on the ground.

The Deputy referred to provision in Dublin and the challenges in that regard. There are 39 special schools in Dublin and two more, namely, Libermann and the new Dublin 7 school, coming on stream. We also have significant special classes in the area. We opened 64 new special classes at primary level in Dublin in the past year and 22 new post-primary special classes. Overall, there is very good co-operation and support from schools. They are generally very supportive of children with special educational needs. That is not to say there have not been challenges, however. Mr. McLoughlin might be able to outline our legislation in that regard and a little about how we come at it when that happens.