Ms Teresa Griffin:

I thank the committee for the invitation to today's meeting and wish to introduce my colleagues from the NCSE, Ms Mary Byrne, head of special education and Mr. Sé Goulding, head of operations.

The NCSE is a very strong supporter of the special needs assistant, SNA, scheme as we know that without SNAs, many students would be unable to attend school. The intention of the scheme is to provide sufficient support to meet a student's care needs but to fade this support over time as the student's needs reduce. Schools' SNA support can change year on year as students leave, enrol and develop greater independence. This year 56% of schools experienced no change, 21% had an increased allocation and 23% a lower allocation, which is broadly in line with what happened last year.

We have allocated almost 10,500 SNA posts to schools to support 22,000 students and are continuing to respond to ongoing applications for SNA support. Approximately 7,000 of these students attend special schools and, generally speaking, have considerably more complex needs and greater care needs than mainstream students. Special schools and special classes have an average of one SNA for every 3.3 students. In mainstream settings,the ratio is one SNA for every 1.47 students supported.

Members can easily see from these figures that, per qualifying student, mainstream schools have more SNA support than special schools. This is because even though some students in mainstream may only require SNA support at transition times during the day or at break times or for toileting reasons, it may be necessary to allocate a full-time post to the school because the support may be required intermittently during the day. Mainstream schools can, therefore, have additional capacity to cater for significant care needs of other students as they may emerge during a school year. For example, this capacity enabled schools to support the care needs of some 2,000 additional students between September and December 2012. I wish to reassure members that additional SNAs were allocated where there was need and that the NCSE is confident that the schools were resourced to meet the care needs of the students concerned.

Members might like to know that this year, over 99% of the 22,000 applications processed by the NCSE for additional teaching or SNA support have been processed without any appeal. We have had 76 appeals in total, 54 in respect of SNAs and 22 in respect of resource teaching decisions, out of the 22,000 processed applications. Some appeals are not necessarily about a SENO's decision, but because there is confusion about the scheme itself. That begs the question as to why there is confusion. There is clear evidence that the role of the SNA has been informally expanded by schools to include an educational remit. Some parents, schools and professionals consider that an SNA is allocated to help with literacy difficulties or to provide therapeutic support, such as speech and language therapy. Often, when SNA care support is being faded or withdrawn completely, a school might advise that they would like the SNA to do other work with a student such as improvement of language, literacy, numeracy and so on. Over 30% of this year's applications were declined for these and other reasons. This is very serious as each application raises expectations and hopes and when applications are declined because they do not meet the criteria for the scheme, there can be disappointment, concern, anxiety and anger and a belief that the NCSE is not doing its job properly or that cuts are the reason for non-allocation.

It has occasionally been suggested that teaching assistants should be introduced to provide additional educational support to these students. Some recent research studies raise serious concerns about the effectiveness of teaching-assistant support for students with special educational needs. While finding some positive effects on teachers' workload and stress levels, these studies found that the more support students received from teaching assistants, the less progress they made in subjects such as English, maths and science.

The research also found that students with special educational needs spent over a quarter of their school time away from mainstream class, their teachers and peers and they were almost constantly accompanied by a teacher assistant who bore the greatest portion of responsibility for planning and teaching them. As a result, they can become overly dependent on teacher-assistant support and socially isolated from other students. Despite the good intentions of teaching assistants, these students received a less appropriate and lower quality educational experience than other students. One US study noted that the substantial increase in teacher-assistant use in US schools had taken place without any compelling evidence that it is educationally sound to deploy the least qualified personnel to provide primary instruction to students with the most complex learning characteristics. On the other hand, research findings consistently demonstrate a strong relationship between the quality of teaching and the outcomes achieved by this group of students.

Given these research findings, that paraprofessionals can act as a barrier to a student's access to the teacher and full participation in classroom activities, and that it is the quality of teaching which determines better educational outcomes, the NCSE in its recent policy advice to the Minister on supporting children with special educational needs argued that there is insufficient evidence at this point in time to support the introduction of a new teaching-assistant grade to work specifically with students with special educational needs.

We have recommended that the Department of Education and Skills should clarify the role of the special needs assistant, SNA, and that SNA work should at all times be focused on developing independent living skills.

The National Council for Special Education, NCSE, believes students with complex learning needs should be taught by fully qualified and experienced teachers equipped with the necessary skills to meet their needs.