Ms Martina Mannion:

I want to give reassurance that we have had a very intensive process over the last two years within the Department of Education, working closely with the National Council for Special Education and, within the Department, with the special education area and also the planning and building unit. We have looked at it much more holistically than we would have done previously. We have gone back and examined, for example, where children in post-primary special classes might have come from. Initially, we might have thought they were all just coming from primary special classes but, in fact, we see at post-primary that about one third of children are coming from primary special classes, one third from mainstream primary and the last third from within the post-primary schools themselves.

We have been very clear. We wrote to all post-primary schools last October to say that we expect that every post-primary school in the country will be opening special classes. For example, over the next three years, in the Deputy’s area of Waterford, we envisage that we will have 17 new primary special classes and 15 new post-primary classes and that is in addition to the classes that we have already opened in the last year. For example, we have opened four new special classes for this school year at primary and four at post-primary.

Each year, we are going to build on what we have done before. We are looking at it in terms of ensuring we have a good geographical spread across counties and across areas. The Deputy can envisage that if every post-primary school has special classes, we are going to have a very big spread. At primary level, we are conscious of children having to travel a distance so we are trying to make sure that we are opening them in areas where there are no other special classes.

We are working with schools that have physical accommodation available to us because one of the key things to get a class open as quickly as possible is to try to target schools that have existing space. We are working with the planning and building unit to make sure that the schools we are looking at in the first instance have space and where schools do not have space we have moved to doing reconfiguration works.

Just so the Deputy will know, we have engaged with the planning and building unit and, in effect, we have introduced a number of new arrangements to facilitate that. Previously, schools would have had to undertake that work themselves but we now have a new framework that schools can draw down that allows the reconfiguration works to be done by people provided by the Department, instead of the schools having to do that themselves. We introduced that last year and it has been hugely successful and it gets the classes open and available more quickly. All of these kinds of initiatives are helping to get the classes open as quickly as possible.

The other thing that we are doing which has worked well is that where schools have agreed to take a class, and where we were either working on the reconfiguration or on modular accommodation, we are making sure that the NCSE has sanction for the teachers and SNAs in advance. This means teachers and SNAs are working with the children, they are reaching out and they are transitioning them from their existing placement into the new placement and they can also make sure that the range of NCSE training and supports is available to the class. We are approaching it holistically and we are looking at it across all of the geographic information system, GIS, areas with the planning and building unit. We are satisfied that we will get to the point where we will have a very wide spread of special class provision across all of our primary and post-primary schools.