Ms Teresa Griffin:

I should have mentioned earlier that the NCSE is working with and holding meetings with the Teaching Council regarding the need for a comprehensive professional development service to be provided in this area. We have recommended to the Department that upskilling in special education should be mandatory because our previous research has shown that one child in every four learns differently, whether he or she has a special educational need, or is perceived by his or her parents or teachers as having a learning difficulty. It is not simply that there may be one child with such a need in a school; it could potentially be one in every four children in a class. Every teacher needs to be knowledgeable about children who learn differently. We have passed that on to the Teaching Council and we are meeting its representatives in this regard. I understand that special education is a permanent feature of the initial teacher education, ITE, course and the council is working on a framework of continuing professional development for all teachers. It will finalise that over the next year or so. We are, therefore, in the middle of discussions on that. However, our discussions focus very much on the children who have learning difficulties and special educational needs.

With regard to the inclusion and support service and providing additional assistance to schools, one of the aspects that strikes everybody when we take time to look and see where we are now as opposed to where we were 15 or 20 years ago is that many different services have been developed. There is a national behavioural service, a special educational support service to provide training for teachers with special educational needs and many other different services. Over the past few years, there has been a huge turnover in the number of principals. Currently, many principals have little experience. While it was fine to have many different services in the system as long as everybody knew who did what, it became clear during our consultations for our May 2013 paper that there is a great deal of confusion about who does what and there were questions about overlap. One of our recommendations regarding inclusion and support is to bring all the groups and all the functions relating to teacher training, advising schools and so on into one service, which we suggest should be called an inclusion and support service under our management. By bringing people together, there will be clarity and it will be much easier for school administrators to understand what supports can be made available in order that they do not spend all their time ringing one person to be told it is another person and so on. That would be an improvement.

How we envisage that happening will have to be discussed over the next while in that the Department has to agree that such a service would be a good idea but if there was one place for people to go, which provided a holistic service to the school, there would be less opportunity for things to fall between the cracks, which is an issue currently. We also envisage that where schools might enrol a child with special educational needs and they do not have experience in supporting such children, there will be a means within the inclusion and support service to provide an outreach service in the school to help the staff support the child. It would be a good innovation and a good service and it would enhance the ability and capacity of schools to support children with special educational needs, but the details have to be worked out over the next while.

There is a much higher incidence of special needs now than five or ten years ago and we have identified three principal areas in which there has been an increased diagnosis. The first is autism, which is unsurprising given it was only recognised in 1998 and, therefore, one would expect an increase. There is capacity in the system for 1% of children with autism which is in or around the international prevalence rate for the disease. The second is speech and language disorders. This not unconnected with a decision a number of years ago by the HSE to recruit many speech and language therapists leading to an increase in diagnosis. The third area is generally in the category of a physical disability and includes illnesses such as dyspraxia, which were not looked at a number of years ago. We asked the professionals in our paper why they thought there was an increase and they said it was due to increased awareness among parents, teachers and professionals that children do not just sit back in the class not learning and an approach can be taken to reach them and help them to learn.

The Deputy referred to the use of standardised tests and whether schools will be penalised even if they are performing well. One of the examples given earlier was a school helping children in the 30th or 40th percentile and bringing them even higher. It is important to emphasise that the proposal from the working group is that all children who are below average will be counted in developing a school's educational profile. If a child is deemed statistically to be in STen 1, 2 or 3, he or she is below average. That is positive because it increases the number of children who are counted because, currently, it is only the 10th percentile of children who are counted. Every child who is below average will be counted in future and that will assist schools. It must be remembered that the use of standardised tests is only one aspect. There are children with complex needs and there are socio-economic indicators.

On the issue of ETBs being a resource, we examined almost everything that we could and we were desperate not to add to the administrative burden for schools in the survey. No matter what way we looked, people said "But". Ultimately, the working group was persuaded by people wanting the voice of teachers and of principals to be heard. Although there is a recognition that it is difficult, the Educational Research Centre, which will analyse and scrutinise the data provided, has other quality assurance mechanisms it can use. For example, if the staff in a school in a socially advantaged area said 90% of its children was in the first or second STen, there is a natural balance to that. There is also a natural balance in that schools will publish data under the literacy and numeracy strategy. There are nice balances in the system. I appreciate the concern people have but it is just one aspect of the overall role.

There were people who anecdotally were going to moneylenders to get money. The National Council for Special Education, NCSE, cannot stand over a system in which parents are so driven as to borrow money, be it from banks, friends or whomever. At one point, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul was assisting parents. Placing parents in such a position is unfair regardless of whether they are wealthy. Before resources can be allocated, the system requires a diagnosis of disability that is not readily available to all parents. This is fundamentally inequitable. In addition, affluent parents can jump to the top of the queue.