Mr. Brendan Doody:

One of the things we are working on, and it is quite advanced at this stage, is guidance for schools on reviewing placements in special classes. With regard to opening a special class, I will put it like this. A young person, a child, could be enrolled in an early-intervention class at the age of two years and eight months. They can progress to a special class in a primary school and spend eight years there. They can progress to a post-primary special class and spend a further six years there, so they can spend their entire education career, if you like, in a special class, and I do not think anybody would agree that is ideal. We want young people to avail of mainstream provision to the greatest extent possible.

When you open a special class, you get guidelines from the NCSE. One of the things referenced in the guidelines is that you should review placements regularly. What we now understand and are working towards is making sure schools have a much better understanding of the purpose of the placement review, how to do it, what the indicators of progress are, and then to support schools to make really good decisions around the placement of that young person. It may be, for example, that while in the equivalent of junior and senior infants that child spends most of their time in the special class placement itself, we are working towards building mainstream engagement over first and second class. We have quite a number of examples of this where, by fifth or sixth class or into the post-primary age, they may not necessarily require the support of the special class into the future.

We are working to finalise that at this point and we hope to have it out early in the next school year.