Dr. Michael Redmond:

This is an agonising systemic bottleneck. It is not down to schools' or boards of management's refusal to enrol children. It is down to the system not being forward-looking enough to put ASD classes in place before demographic bubbles - if I can use that term - of children with particular special needs arrive into post-primary education. These children are well flagged. They are well known to the system and well identified locally. The special educational needs officers, SENOs, are well aware not only of the number of children in these situations but of their names. We are absolutely at a loss to understand how that forward provision, that is, establishing school places, cannot be made.

Much of the school stock in all three sectors, but particularly in the voluntary secondary sector, if I may say so, is quite old. It is on tight old sites with little scope for expansion. Very often, an additional building is needed rather than just putting up a prefab and ghettoising these children when they should be part of the real school community. Real, pre-planned and forward-looking infrastructural investment is needed. It is not only the National Council for Special Education and the school system that need to engage in this. The planning and building unit also needs to be well ahead of the curve on all of these provisions because not only does this unit provide for additional spaces, it also provides for conversion or merging of rooms and for quiet spaces for children who need that resource.

The matter of staffing is straightforward, as is the enrolment. Local provision where bottlenecks exist and the lack of forward planning are the issues. This should have been seen in Cork and Limerick years ago. The solution in Limerick was simply to gather everybody together and, virtually and straightforwardly, to look school patrons and boards of management in the eye and ask if and when they would take these students and where they would put them in their schools. I was present for one of those conversations and it took quite a long time to work through the significant number of schools in the Limerick area. There was no resistance in principle to these classes. One or two schools cited problems and constrictions but no school had an issue with its values, enrolment policy or intention to comply with the law. No school refused an ASD class. There are a whole lot of little anomalies but it is possible to work around all of them if given time. To come in very late in a year, and it is now late in the year for school planning, and seek to put ASD special classes into schools that are not prepared for them is not good for the children. However, neither is it good for them to be left out or to have a year of no schooling.