Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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I thank Deputy Farrell for his interest in special education, on which he speaks to me regularly. I am not sure if the Deputy was in attendance when I mentioned the EPSEN Act earlier. I have launched a review of the Act, which is not before time as it is 17 years since the Act was first published in 2004. Parts of the Act were never commenced and there were good reasons for that at the time. One was related to funding. I believe commencement of each section of the Act was costed at €225 million or thereabouts. However, the Act did put the National Council for Special Education on a statutory footing, which was a good thing, and provided for the membership of the NCSE. We now have increased investment to €2 billion, which was not available at that time.

We have also changed our approach, moving from a diagnosis-led approach to a more needs-based approach. That must be taken into account. The current process involves setting up the steering group, which will include representatives of the Department, advocacy groups and the National Council for Special Education. I also have an advisory group, which is more of a fit for advocacy groups and NGOs. We want to hear from everybody through the consultation we will have after that. We expect the consultation to take around three months. I do not want it to be open-ended because it might never be completed otherwise. The bottom line for me and, I am sure, the Minister, Deputy Foley, is to ensure we implement the Act in full and that it is reflective of the views of children with additional needs and what they fight for and face, bearing in mind that it should be streamlined with the approach of the Department.

We have an additional 1,165 SNAs available from January of this year. That SNA reallocation will take place. The Deputy is correct that it has been two years and it was stopped as a result of Covid. We are hoping to focus on schools for which the SNA allocation was frozen during that period and which may have been disadvantaged. We are aware of that and the National Council for Special Education is working very closely with schools on exceptional reviews and all of those matters through the SENOs. As I said earlier, we will have more than 19,000 SNAs by the end of this year. It is imperative that schools have an adequate facility. We will be reviewing this over the next few weeks.