Ms Caroline Quinn:

I will take that one. I will take the questions from the bottom up. Regarding the SNA continuing professional development, we are delighted that, through University College Dublin, a year-lone course was developed for SNAs and many of them have already taken that up. That is hugely beneficial. One of the things we would call for is continuing professional development. If the SNA is dealing with a child with a particular disability, they should be able to access some kind of training for whatever that is. That would be very important. As regards seeing the teacher, parent-teacher meetings formally happen once a year but it should be easy for any parent to access an appointment in the school. We would certainly support that. It is interesting that the Senator brings up the children with dyslexia because that relates directly back to the issue with NEPS. There are not enough NEPS psychologists out there. When a school may only have two or three assessments, as was described earlier, it is going to go with the children with the most complex needs first.

The children with dyslexia fall down a little in the priority list. That is really important.

We would very much support some kind of centralised management of transport because it is difficult. The anomaly is that bus escorts are employed by the school board but the system is run by Bus Éireann. It subcontracts to bus drivers locally but the Department oversees it. That is one very confusing system that we work through.