Dr. Niall Muldoon:

I thank the Chair. On the idea behind the Plan for Places report, just as the Chair talked about in the case of politicians, we had continuous engagement with families who were concerned about not having a place for their child, even if they had been in the system for eight years through the primary school network. As we found it very difficult to deal with them on an individual basis, we felt it was important to start talking to the Department itself and find out where it was gathering its information, how it was being used and what its structures were. We engaged with the Department for more than a year to find out what it was doing within the building unit and the planning units and all the other elements that came with that. We felt that it was making progress. We made recommendations in which we asked the Department to further refine its data collection to ensure that no child was left without a place with plenty of notice. As the Chair also mentioned, it is often left to the last minute. When we published the report in June 2022, members will remember well that we found that 300 children were waiting at that stage. There was a huge amount of activity. Within three weeks, the Dáil passed an amendment to the Act that allowed the then Minister of State with responsibility for special education to force schools or to strongly encourage schools to open up places, which is something that had not happened previously during that period of time. That meant that that backlog was eventually cleared although I believe one or two children still were left behind.

Last year, we found there were fewer concerns about it. We did not get as many complaints about it but we see the complaints coming on again this year. We have written again and about a month ago, I wrote again to the Department of Education to state that coming up to the second anniversary of the publication of the Plan for Places report, we wanted to know where the Department is at at this stage and whether that has improved because we are still concerned that it has not moved in the direction that guarantees capacity across the areas.