Mr. Mark Darmody:

I will make a few quick points about the issues in schools. First is summer provision. As someone who has been in many special schools there is an issue with paying special needs assistants, SNAs. The SNAs will always bring up the finance issue so that should be borne in mind. Paying them €17 per hour is an issue.

Second is inclusion and the law on same. Section 2 of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act 2004 and section 7 of the Equal Status Act 2000 have provisions that basically say that if you have special needs you can more or less be removed from education if you are disrupting the education of other children. I am not sure how that is inclusive. If that law remains I do not see how we can move forward with including children.

Third, the use of force is a major issue within schools and I have not heard that brought up here yet. There are no national guidelines for how children can be handled in this State in any capacity. It is a serious issue because the staff will have to put their hands on our two sons and there are no guidelines whatsoever surrounding that. If we take out special needs there are junior infants who could bolt for the road or two guys could get in a fight in a school and there are no guidelines. To put special needs into the middle of that is like lighting a fire. In theory we want every national school to be inclusive and that is the goal for every child but unfortunately we have a long way to go. We need to look at the guidelines and there are none right now. Even in special schools they are struggling with this and there is nobody there to help them and to say what needs to be done.

We all know the law changed on reduced hours in school. Unfortunately there is a culture where the children are still being sent home early. That is being done in good faith because the parents do not want a suspension for one hour because of their children. What happens in my world, the legal world, is that the educational welfare officer is not notified and no help comes to the child. It is like there is a habit of sending home the child but we do not get the educational welfare officer to come in then after the 20 days to say that there is a serious problem. Those are major legal issues on the ground that I would like to see tackled. Maybe I can make a submission on that in writing.