Ms Elaine Jenkins:

It is something for which we have advocated and we have discussed it with the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan. Our children are often difficult for us to understand, so, with all due respect, how can we expect an educator to understand all the children in his or her classroom, who have a variety of needs? I do not pretend to understand dyslexia or dyspraxia because I do not have experience of them. With one in 20 boys on the autism spectrum, according to a HSE psychologist, the teaching unions, the teaching colleges and the NCSE teaching council need to step up and face the reality that there are diverse needs in every classroom every day and those needs are not being met. We covered the fact that the lack of therapists is exasperating the whole issue because children are not having their sensory needs met. Teachers do not know how to teach children how to communicate. They might do a two-week picture exchange communication system, PECS, course but that is not going to bring our children up a level.

A big concern we have is that there are no ambitions for our children. A lot of the attitude is to get the children through this year. A teacher will do his or her year or two years in the autism class and it will then be somebody else's turn. We want our children to able to read and write when they leave school, however. We need the basics for our children but that will not be possible until the teachers are trained. Other countries do it well. In Slovakia, students do part of their teaching degree and then focus on speech or occupational therapy to finish the degree. There are examples of other countries in Europe that do it really well. That should be the basic level; the minimum our children are getting.