Ms Martina Mannion:

Yes. I thank the Deputy. The Department is very conscious of working with the Department of children on the younger children in particular. The Department obviously supports children from a younger age through, in the first instance, the home tuition scheme, which is on top of the early intervention places. We work and support the AIM, which is supported by the Department of children, but obviously that identifies both the universal and the targeted approach. The SENOs and the NCSE work very closely with the parents. They do not just support the parents of children and the children of schoolgoing age as they also work with parents of younger children. The Department has engaged very closely with the Department of children on the review of the AIM programme and that was published in January of this year. All that feeds into the information we work off for our forward planning piece.

One of the challenges parents experience is in many cases children are not diagnosed necessarily at a young age, so in many cases we now see children being diagnosed, especially with autism, and looking for a school place from the age of maybe seven or eight years. Many of the new special classes we are opening we see are predominantly supporting the seven-to-nine age group. We see there is a bigger number of those children coming through into the system and our forward planning, which we talked about previously with the Deputy, is ensuring we have enough special class provision as broadly as we can across each county to ensure we have enough places for children of primary school age and then as they move on into post-primary school age. As the Minister said, we have almost 3,000 special classes at primary. Our focus continues to be on primary because that is where our larger numbers are. There will be bigger numbers of children requiring special classes at post-primary, but they are not coming through in that demographic bulge until maybe the next couple of years. The forward planning work we are doing with the planning and building unit is to ensure we have sufficient capacity.

We also see a number of children, as they move to that age, are looking for special school places, and the Minister has talked about the really significant expansion of special school provision. In addition to the new special schools we have opened, we have also significantly expanded existing special schools to provide additional places across the country. We are working really closely with the NCSE and we are very hopeful the additional SENOs on the ground will, as the Minister said, mean we will have much better quality data, faster data and a much better handle on the children and where they are so we can ensure we have provision for them in as local a school placement as we can.