Mr. Ciarán Cronin:

I will jump in on that. As school principals we need to move away from feeling that we are going to lose a resource. Everything comes down to losing a teacher. As an example, several children with significant needs have joined our school since September. They will need support throughout the year. However, we lost 20 children who were living in IPAS accommodation near the school. More than likely, even though we are getting more children with complex needs, we are going to lose a class teacher because our numbers have dropped below that golden number schools have to have on 30 September. It makes it very hard for schools when everything is about having to have things in order to have other resources. If we want to be inclusive we need to be able to be confident in what we have and not be afraid that if a child does not come in, we might lose a teacher or an SNA. We need to move away from that system.