Dr. Lindsey Liston:

In terms of cost, if we look at The Sky is the Limit programme, which provides the family support services the Deputy refers to – the wraparound services in child counselling, parent counselling, parent support, housing support, social welfare support and so on – at the moment the cost is €250,000 a year because it is run with an awful lot of goodwill. There is a double benefit. We have the third level institutions and the Government which needs a required number of clinicians every year, so that makes sense. That cost is not really there. We got an awful lot of goodwill from our assistant psychologist, who has recently retired, who gave the time for free. Excluding that free time, the cost of this model is about €250,000 a year. It is not going to break anybody's bank but if philanthropic funding were not there, quite frankly we could not provide these supports. They would cease to exist in the schools. What would happen is that we would go back to that situation where an inordinate number of children with additional needs would be suspended and expelled from school, and be rerouted to other schools because we would not have the resources to meet the children's needs. That is the benefit of having the services embedded within the school, both for parents and young people. If those services were gone tomorrow then, quite frankly, we would continue to hear the narrative of parents saying they have school places but, unfortunately, the schools do not have the resources to meet the children's needs.

Special classrooms are wonderful. They are great. They must be welcomed. The Government is doing a very good job in pushing those classrooms, but there is a cap on the number of children who can benefit from them. That is about five to six per year in the junior cycle when they come in, and they can stay for the entirety of their primary school education. The number of children who benefit from that is limited. When we have wraparound supports that are available in the school, it means that those intervention supports are available for those children and we do not have to pick up the phone and say: "Come at 11 o'clock and take your child home because we no longer have somebody here to provide supports for children." The cost is not huge but the outcomes are immeasurable from the perspective of the child and the family.