Dr. Fidelma Brady:

To pick up on Mr. Harris's point on what a complex educational need actually is, generally speaking, as somebody who has worked for many years in the education of children with Down's syndrome, it was not a term I was bandying about all the time. We rarely referred to it. All of a sudden, it is the arrival of this circular and those three little words are missing. Now, all of a sudden, we are obsessing about complex educational needs. From our perspective, it is impossible. It depends on what country you are in or which research you read that will give you a definition of a complex need. There is global developmental delay, for instance, which Down's syndrome can be considered as. If you take complex need from that perspective, it is a significant delay in two or more developmental areas. They are growth and fine motor, speech and language, cognition or cognitive profile, personal and social development, which we often disregard because all of a sudden the Department is bringing us down the road of reading and numbers for the sTen tests.

The activities of daily living are something we also have forgotten about, which also leads nicely to the Senator's question around post-primary schools. There is SET allocation at post-primary school level but its effectiveness is questionable. Mr. Harris already said this morning that SET allocation at post-primary schools is used to reduce pupil-teacher ratios. I have seen many instances where the only SET allocation given to students with Down's syndrome, who are officially supposed to get one-to-one support, is within a small group because schools are trying to maximise the small amount of time they get. Instead of a focus on what the individual child needs, it is about getting all the children who need it and putting them in one room. I have seen small groups of 30 students in post-primary schools. In my opinion, those children would be better off at home than being in that situation.