Helen McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the last question, as I understand it my ministerial colleague, Deputy Moynihan, said he would revert to the Deputy but I ask him to forward the details to my office too. As we discussed last week, with any suggested or proposed changes to the designation of any class or school the intention is to make classrooms and schools more inclusive and not to exclude anybody. It is not to prevent any child, irrespective of his or her need, from being allowed to go to a school or classroom. We want to make them as inclusive as possible. That is the number one priority and objective. In Tipperary there are 155 special classes, 17 of which are new for this year alone. They are spread across primary and post-primary level based on the fact that there is a need. We must make sure that we provide for that need. The Deputy has gone into a lot of detail here but I ask him to send those details on to my office so we can check exactly what has happened. If there is a need, as far as I am concerned, we should provide for that need. We should not be sending children past a local school or past where they were and certainly it should never be the case that a child would be removed from a classroom that he or she is already in. It would be helpful to have all of the details.

The Deputy's first question was around career guidance. I absolutely appreciate what he is saying about the support that career guidance counsellors provide. We have a number of different strands and ways in which we are trying to provide counselling separately in our schools. We have a €5 million pilot in our primary schools, included in the funding we are discussing here today, whereby one-on-one support is being provided to primary school students. Obviously we will need to assess the pilot and see how we can expand it further. I am interested in what Deputy O'Meara said about the refund criteria, particularly in terms of the role the individual plays. One can say that guidance counsellors have a different role to teachers and perhaps that should be applied differently. That is something I will have to revert to the Deputy on. We are doing what we can to make sure there is support in our schools, not just through the pilot I have mentioned but also in the reform of the SPHE and RSE curricula. We are supporting teachers to roll that out in different ways through different types of training. I will have to revert to the Deputy on his specific question about the refund. I take the points he made on board.