Ms Teresa Griffin:

Yes. It is completely inappropriate for a label to be attached to a child for the allocation of educational resources. Equally, we are very strong in our position that children must be assessed in order to help inform their teaching and learning and to help parents. That is why I say it is unnecessary labelling. There is a better way of allocating resources that is without the need to label children, unless it is clinically needed for the treatment of their health.

A question was posed about post-primary provision. We have concerns about this. For example, the special class model was the model used in primary school situations and it was transplanted to a post-primary situation. Post-primary schools are more complex than primary schools because there are multiple courses and teachers, etc. We have been told that, for example, some of the professional development courses were still aimed at primary teachers. Post-primary teachers would attend them and find that what was being taught was not age appropriate. We feel that professional development needs to be focused on the needs of post-primary students, because their needs are quite complex. Once they hit puberty, there can be a whole load of things going on in their lives as well as the fact that they have additional needs.

Given the additional complexity associated with post-primary schools, we also feel that the Department could consider allocating an additional number of hours to them to allow for greater co-ordination across subjects and year groups. That is a particular difficulty, especially given that post-primary schools are so much bigger than primary schools. We also think there needs to be a more effective use of resources. The Department needs to put an end to the practice of filling teacher timetables. If additional hours are allocated to a post-primary school, it is completely inappropriate for those hours to be given to, for instance, a French teacher where French is not being taught. The teachers who are allocated resource teaching hours should be able to understand how these children learn, identify what they need and know how best to support them. These hours should not be used simply as a timetable filler.

Those were the issues we had about post-primary and that it does need to be developed a little bit more.

With regard to increasing prevalence of ASD, Deputy Thomas Byrne made reference to the underlying reasons. We asked this question when we were doing the consultation around our autism paper. While it is a worldwide phenomenon that the prevalence is increasing and we are now in line with the UK and the US, the reasons for that are broad. First of all, there is greater awareness on the part of teachers and parents of the triggers that would identify a child as being different. Parents and teachers are much more willing to identify children for assessment. Professionals are also much more aware of the fact of autism. Broadly speaking, one cannot say that the human genome has changed but there is certainly something happening out there in schools posing a very significant problem, not just for the education system but also for the post-school system. I was in a school yesterday and in which children's behaviour was being discussed. The teachers were saying these children were not autistic but there was something completely different about the behaviour of some children now than was the case ten years ago. They do not know what it is but children can certainly react aggressively within a split second. This is being said by teachers who are very well skilled and well qualified in dealing with behaviour. They say that there is something about the behaviour. What it is I cannot say as I am not a professional and I do not know.

Reference was made to categories of disability and legal advice. I am not going to give the committee a legal opinion one way or the other. We would say to the Department that it has restricted access to certain schemes on the basis of the category of disability. We believe there is evidence out there that children can benefit. In other jurisdictions, for example, access to an extended school year is done on the basis of need as opposed to categories of disability. It is much broader than being simply just autism or severe profound general learning disability.