Dr. Fidelma Brady:

It is my understanding that the role of the SENOs has evolved to a certain degree and that a whole new tranche of SENOs has been appointed in recent weeks who have the qualifications. However, they are not qualified to the extent that I believe they should be questioning the opinion of fully qualified professionals in their field who may have highly rated masters or doctorate degrees in psychology and so forth. While I am aware that there has been some development on the qualifications required for SENOs, I am not up to speed sufficiently on it. I am aware of parents in the past who have had psychological assessments rubbished because SENOs decided they were not getting the support and that was it.

As for parents getting assessments privately only to then find they are not appropriate or do not meet certain criteria, I dealt with a couple of cases where parents went to the North for an assessment. That caused absolute chaos as the scales for rating children's needs in the North are totally different to those the South. Those parents spent a considerable amount of money and they may as well not have bothered because the assessments were not accepted.