Mr. P?iric Clerkin:

Like my colleagues, I took the brief as being much broader and raised the issues we felt to be crucially important for children with special educational needs who could not access a classroom. We believe that there are solutions that would make the situation better for families through the admissions Act. This is an issue we have raised with all of our colleagues whenever we have had the opportunity because we believe it will make special education accessible for children in their local area. We are very concerned that children are not getting the opportunity to attend school with their brothers, sisters and friends in their local community. That is something we would like to see corrected and is therefore an issue we have highlighted today.

We absolutely support the July provision and want to see it succeed. From a schools point of view, school leaders proactively promoted the scheme but, quite simply, they found it very difficult to get staff in a position to take it up this year. As an organisation, we have proactively engaged with the Department with regard to supporting families, schools and children and we made it easier for them to access a teacher or special needs assistant, SNA, through our portal for education posts. We developed that technology to support families. That was very much our focus for this year. We will develop that further. We want to see the scheme succeed. We appreciate how important it is for children who have missed out on a great deal over recent years and who are facing another very difficult challenge this year because many schools, especially in urban areas, have posts vacant and are not in a position to fill them. We appreciate how important it is for children with extra needs and, as an organisation, we will be doing everything in our power to ensure it succeeds.