Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)

I thank the Deputy for her questions. She is correct that the focus has really been on primary school places and ensuring we have that provision in place. The focus now needs not to move away from primary schools but to broaden ensure there is an enhanced focus on our secondary schools. This is why we are focused on targeting four classrooms per secondary school, which would include Athboy and everywhere else. It is a matter of rolling this out and doing as much as we can every year. At the moment, and again this goes back to previous questions, about 50% of all primary schools have a special education classroom, while about 75% of post-primary schools or secondary schools have special education classrooms. Of course, we wish to increase this provision. There are more primary schools, so we need to keep focused on the primary school level while also ensuring we have this provision in all our secondary schools right across the country too. Some 22 new classrooms are being provided in Meath, 17 in primary schools and five in post-primary schools. As well as the special schools we currently have, our new special school in Meath West has an additional ten places compared to last year. We are, therefore, building the capacity, and not just in primary schools and post-primary schools but also in our special schools.