Ms Martina Mannion:

I am conscious in relation to the Irish language that my colleagues from the curriculum and assessment unit and Irish language unit would be better able to describe how we are approaching this, including for children with special educational needs. With the Chair's permission, we will come back to the Deputy in writing on that issue. It is important, given the range of work being done, that the people who can best describe it and are not here today come back on that. I will ask Mr. Doody to respond on gifted children. It is something we are very conscious of. When we come to committees and discuss children with complex needs, it tends to look like we are focusing on the children in special schools and special classes and children with more complex needs but our work concerns all children with special educational needs. About 25% of children in our school system have a special educational need of some kind, so we want to ensure the resources and supports we provide meet the need across that. That includes, for example, children with dyslexia. In talking about gifted children, Mr. Doody may touch on how our mainstream supports are working.

On the summer programme, we appreciate the work the autism committee did in this regard. It brought a focus to the summer programme which was helpful to us. Mr. Hanlon works closely with open special schools and classes and all the advocacy groups. Those groups' focus was on the summer programme for the past year and that will be the case again. We got funding in the budget which will allow us to have that very expanded summer programme again this year. That is important. Half of all special schools are now providing it and that is where the children with the most complex needs are. We have seen an increase of over 300% in the number of children participating in the programme since 2019. We know there is more to be done but we have seen a big increase in numbers. Mr. Hanlon will talk about that.

Part of what we have tried to do in acknowledging not all schools do the summer programme is to look at other ways to help parents access it. We have had small group providers and made changes where we worked with certain co-ordinators for the special school. I reassure the Deputy we have come at this in an open-minded way. We have not just used the old tactics to increase capacity on the summer programme but introduced a number of innovative processes last year which we think helped and will help this year. I ask Mr. Hanlon to provide that information and then Mr. Doody will talk about gifted children and dyslexia.