Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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Good afternoon to our guests, who are all speaking a lot of sense. This is an issue I encounter in my constituency on a weekly, almost a daily, basis. Families tell me their children are on the waiting list for an assessment or if they have had the assessment, they are waiting for services. I am from Cavan and the team there are not giving dates to parents for children to get services, which I think is illegal. They are saying they cannot supply a date. Staff are leaving. Our guests have dealt with many of the issues in respect of the recruitment and promotion problems. The problems with registration were also mentioned, which I assume was a reference to CORU, which is another body that is under-resourced. My concerns are for the children who need those services now. Even if we increase the number of people going to college to take up all of these professions, it will take a number of years. Do our guests think the PDS model could work if it was properly resourced, better funded and fully staffed?

The model has been on paper since 2014. It was rolled out over 2020 and 2021. CDNTs were set up. The teams that were taken over already had waiting lists. Professionals have told me they could not understand how it was going to make a difference because we have waiting lists and the new approach was just going to compound them. Our guests have also dealt with the lack of leadership and consultation. Could the PDS model work? Is there a role within education? The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, requires inclusive education. We are not meeting that requirement at the moment. Inclusive education means that all children attend the local school except those with the most profound and complex disabilities. That is not possible now because schools are not properly resourced. They do not have enough special needs assistants, SNAs, or teachers. We need people from our guests' professions to work in the schools. That was happening in some of the special schools prior to the PDS model. They were then withdrawn. It was expected they would return but that has not happened, or not in all cases. What are our guests' opinions in that regard? Is working within schools a good model? I know the social inclusion model is slightly different from the preschool model. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of our guests on those matters and how best to progress them. We are going to have to properly resource our education system to ensure an inclusive educational process for children.

Another issue that has been brought up at the committee on a number of occasions is the rapid prompting method. I have read our guests' submission on that point and respect their professionalism and analyses. Some parents have seen such a model work for their children. Perhaps they did not have access to other models to see if they would work for their children or those other models did not work. Is there any role for the rapid prompting method, even to allow a child to begin the communication process? Our guests' concern is that it is not the child or young person's own communication because they are being prompted in a certain way. Is there a role for it even as an initial step to getting to a better model, as such?