Dr. Rosalyn Tamming:

We are not that involved in that, but to my understanding there will not be equal access. We were asked to evaluate the enhanced in-school therapy project which was where CDNTs were allocated into schools. Now, the decision is that the new therapy service is going to use therapists employed directly by the Department of education, so they are not part of CDNTs. I think it is being called a pilot. I am not sure. It is starting in 45 special schools. The intention is that it will go into all special schools, then into special classes, and into the mainstream but that is an incremental development. I saw in the budget there was some provision made for this, but they are only getting up and running this year. They are recruiting. There is a lot of work going on between the Department of education, the Department of children and disability and the HSE, as to how this is going to work seamlessly between the different services. Even our evaluation, which was putting therapists back into special schools, was seen by some of the people we spoke to as being an inequitable approach because in the CDNTs everyone was prioritised based on need, but now you are prioritising based on where someone went to school. While children in special schools tend to have higher needs, they also tend to have those needs met through the existing services. Some of the managers of the CDNTs told us those were not the children they were losing sleep over, because there are other children, maybe in mainstream schools, who have stopped going to school and they do not have the resources for those children because the resources are gone to the special school. That pilot is still running. I do not know what the decision is, but I imagine it will be phased out as the new system comes in.