Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

There is no restriction on the recruitment of special needs assistants. The Department of Education and Science has been conducting a review of special needs assistance provision in primary schools. The review is concerned with the level and deployment of special needs assistance posts in mainstream classes. The intention of this is to ensure that the level of approved special needs assistance support in schools, and the manner in which that support is allocated, ensures that the special care needs of pupils are being appropriately met. Where the review to date has found that additional special needs assistants are needed to cater for the needs of specific children in schools, those schools have been informed that they may make the necessary arrangements immediately for putting the required staff in place.

The review has also found that some schools no longer have the care needs for which the special needs assistant was originally sanctioned. In some cases the child may have left the school while in other cases the care needs of the child have diminished as the child has progressed through the school. Where a child for whom a special needs assistant was sanctioned no longer needs such support, that post ceases. In this regard the schools where surplus special needs assistant support was identified have been advised they may retain this surplus until the end of the current school year.

There is no redeployment scheme in place by which special needs assistants, surplus to requirements in a particular school, can be redeployed to another school. Putting such a scheme in place would be complex as there is no guarantee that as a post becomes surplus in one school, an additional post would become available in the locality.

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