Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Cuirim fáilte roimh na finnéithe. Tá brón orm as a bheith mall ach bhí mé ag éisteacht leo. The meeting was informative before I landed so I thank the witnesses for that. The headings in their submission cover a lot anyway in the sense of the shooting match and the gambit. What we are talking about is that we want children to have appropriate places in schools and to ensure everyone has supports and a framework that works. There are the AONs, the backlog, the issue of CDNTs being divorced from schools, and the issue of parents who are looking for a means to deal with episodes that can happen with children with challenging needs and trying to find strategies, but the schools and everyone who works in the sector also need that. It is why everyone has bought into the idea of in-school therapy. I have no doubt that the research the NDA is doing with pilot schemes will not point out that this is a bad thing. My big fear is that the 45 schools for which recruitment of therapists is ongoing will be inundated with applications until this is rolled out with a proper methodology.

I will continue the theme of what was said about Portugal and integrated teams. What kind of resources are needed and how different does what it is doing look from the pilot schemes we are operating? How can we eventually get to the perfect place? As far as I am concerned the perfect place - I will stand corrected if someone can point to something better - is in-school therapies that provide everything and involve the parents, SNAs, teachers and principal so everyone engages and everyone gets the benefit. Best practice is then employed and even for those periods where, for example, the occupational therapist or speech and language therapist is not there, some kind of assistive technology is available to do back-up work and we have a system in place for transitions and whatever else. Then, in a perfect world, universal design would almost be built in to how it operates.

We are talking about what is the best practice we are seeing in operation here, what it is internationally and how we get there. What sort of resources are we talking about? How different does it look from the set-up we have at the moment?