Shane Curley (Fianna Fail)

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire Stáit as ucht a bheith anseo.

My first question relates to the extra special classes that are being rolled out. It is very welcome. However, and I may have mentioned this already, if we take my home town of Loughrea, we have a town of 6,000 people with no special class, good, bad or indifferent, at second level. In the case of my own cousin, he is a three-minute drive outside Loughrea town or a ten-minute walk and he had to drive the whole way to Athenry to avail of a special class down there. It makes sense for so many different reasons. There is a current 13-classroom extension in the pipeline for St. Brigid's College, one of the two schools in Loughrea, which includes two SEN classrooms. If the Minister of State could work with the Minister, Deputy McEntee, to see that delivered at speed, I would be hugely grateful.

The NCSE produced a report in 2024 called An Inclusive Education for an Inclusive Society? Basically, the big issue it found is that once a student is given a special-school placement, there is rarely a review afterwards to look at that child's progress. In a lot of cases, children who could potentially thrive in the mainstream setting are left in a special school for their entire school experience. It is a lost opportunity in ways. Is there a plan in place to bring in more extensive and systematic reviews of that?

A huge issue that was raised with me, first at the INTO conference and since by a lot of principals, is that ASD classes are hugely welcome. The principals want them. They want to provide that service in their area, whether it is a rural area or in a town. However, if a teacher is told in March or April of 2025 that they are going to be in an ASD class from September, they have to wait until the day they start teaching in that classroom to avail of NCSE training to be able to provide the proper service to kids with ASD. I know the counterargument is made that the ASD training is built into the new PME and the BEd at primary level. That is fine and I get that but I did the inclusive education elective in Trinity College Dublin when I was doing my PME and I still found that at 23 or 24 years of age I just did not have the life experience to be a teacher in an ASD classroom. It comes with life experience as well. The vast majority of teachers who are of an age where they have the life experience that will equip them with the emotional skills to deal with that have not gone through that education system. We need to look at that. There are teachers going in who feel totally lost and believe they do not have the skills and the expertise to deal with the students who are under their care. It is a huge thing and it would be helpful if there was a bit more flexibility from the NCSE to provide that training in a more timely fashion, the minute a school gives notice to the teachers that it is about to allocate a certain teacher to an ASD class.

Finally, as regards SNAs, obviously we have had a huge influx of immigration into Ireland in recent years and that is fine. One huge thing is that disabilities are not the preserve of Irish students who speak English or Irish in the Gaeltacht; it is also an issue for kids from all over the world. There is also the provision of SNAs who speak Ukrainian, Russian and all these languages that are now very prevalent in Irish classrooms. I was speaking to a teacher in the coffee dock this week. She is teaching 34 students in a classroom, of whom 20 are non-English-speaking students and four of them, at least, are showing signs that they have disabilities of some sort or other. That is something we need to be acutely aware of as well.