Dr. Noreen O'Leary:

That idea of more joined-up thinking and work between the Departments of Health and Education was one of the fundamental goals of PDS. That was one of their core objectives in the initial report in 2009 and it has not been realised. A circular was issued by the Department of Education quite recently saying it will not include CDNT figures in its calculations of special education teaching hour because it feels it is not an accurate representation, which is a very worrying development. It gives an insight into how the relationships between those Departments are at the moment and we really need to strengthen those.

The Deputy asked why was this model set up. It is one of the reasons we have been very keen to see the minutes of the initial meetings of the reference group. We hope that is where we might find that information. From the documents we could access, a driving force seemed to be the fact that there was a geographical inequity. There was a postcode lottery and some pockets of the country where children were receiving quite a good service. We are certainly not saying that it was perfect but they were receiving a good service. Families on the whole felt reasonably happy. They felt they were better off once they were with services and that things were improving. There were other pockets of the country where there may have not been a service provider. That goes back to the fact that services developed in a very ad hoc manner with some delivered by the HSE and others delivered by voluntary agencies. There was no co-ordinated development. From what we looked into, the driving force around it was that in a region, they are going to pool the available resources and create services that are more geographically-based. The aspiration was that children would be able to access their services local to themselves

. As the Deputy mentioned, from the very outset there was an issue around children who go to special schools. By the nature of special schools, children come from a number of catchment areas. There was a concern about whether four or five CDNTs would feed into the one school and how that would work. One of the concerns we found in our report was that there was not really an evidence base put forward in the initial report for the ceasing of school-based therapies. We have now seen a period where a lot of families have communicated their dissatisfaction with it. When Deputy Micheál Martin was Taoiseach, he described it as a dilution of services for children in special schools. We are now in a place where there has been a decision to try to reinstate those services after a period of quite a lot of disruption. Again, we have not actually seen the evidence base for that. What is different now?

Obviously we want families to be listened to. The Deputy mentioned international model. In New Zealand the model of disability services is much more housed within the education system. Therapists are much more based within the schools. As we have said, we are not saying that we should take that model and implement a blanket roll-out in Ireland, but there may be important learning from there. We could look at how can we best work collaboratively between education and health. There could be that cascade effect of therapists working very closely with schools, upskilling across the school, and teachers feeling more supported potentially in conjunction, as Ms Moran said, with more focused training for teachers and education staff so that we are coming at it from a few different angles. We can definitely look at other jurisdictions, but it is about looking at them critically and seeing how would that work in an Irish context because there will always be specific factors that will impact how we can implement something.