Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the Minister of State and her officials and thank her for her presentation. I wish to raise a couple of issues in respect of the progressing disability model. While I acknowledge it is not under the remit of the Minister of State, it affects schools in that there has been a withdrawal of speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists from special schools. I am very concerned about that, as are the parents. They are very distressed about it. The Minister of State referenced the social inclusion model. We had the NCSE before the committee recently, whose representatives also spoke about it. To me, that sounds like an excellent model. I acknowledge it is only a pilot programme at present but I would love to see it rolled out. However, is one not in contravention of the other, that is, withdrawing services from a school and then looking at a pilot programme to put services into schools? The right method would be to put the services into the school to support the students. If we want an inclusive education and if we want students with additional needs to attend mainstream classes, we have to put in the supports to do that.

I am concerned as well that we have seen the expulsion of a number of children from special schools. These are children with additional needs who are being expelled, disgracefully, from special schools. However, the bottom line is that schools are not given the supports to support those students or perhaps the children did not get the supports at an early enough age to ensure they could engage in education as they go along.

I would also like to comment on an issue that is connected to the progressing disability model. They seem to have moved away from the assessment of need under the Disability Act 2005, which provides for a multidisciplinary assessment that outlines the health and educational needs of the child. Instead, we have gone towards the child undergoing a standard operating procedure that I am told is an hour or an hour-and-a-half assessment, only for them to just be put on another waiting list. As a result, they are not getting a diagnosis. Then, when such children need to get into an autism unit, a special class or a special school, they are not admitted because the school states they must have a diagnosis. When I brought this up with the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, I was told that they do not require a diagnosis to get into a special class or a special school but most schools have that in their admissions policy. I seek clarification on that because it is a quite serious matter.

I welcome the review of the EPSEN Act but I ask that it be fully implemented this time. There were several aspects of that Act that were never fully implemented and, in particular, the individual education plans for children.

My colleague, Deputy Andrews, may make the end of the meeting if time allows but he raised a concern about the lack of autism spectrum disorder, ASD, classes in the Dublin 6 area, as well as the fact that every day, over €72,000 is being spent on bussing children out of their localities and into special schools or autism units in different areas. In this regard, 14 students are being bussed into one area in Dublin 6 from another area, when there is need in that area and Deputy Andrews is pointing to a lack of planning.

My last question, I have a lot of them, is on Irish Sign Language. Irish Sign Language has been one of our official languages since 2017. There is a course in Trinity College Dublin in which students who are deaf or who are hard of hearing can take Irish Sign Language as a subject and they will become qualified. Yet, they are not recognised by the Teaching Council to teach that subject.

The Teaching Council tells us that it is not part of the curriculum and the curriculum tells us that the Teaching Council does not recognise it. It has kind of been put from one to the other. Does the Minister of State have a comment on that as well?