Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick East, Labour)

I welcome the opportunity to raise this issue with my colleague, Deputy Costello. Last week, we met some teachers from north inner-city Dublin who told us that 14 schools there will lose resource hours this year. I spoke to a principal in my constituency today who told me that her school will lose four resource teachers this year in the context of the introduction of the weighted system.

It seems completely wrong that the most disadvantaged schools are losing resource teachers for children with special needs at a time when the Government is talking about addressing educational disadvantage. The Minister must re-examine the weighting system in the context of these specific schools. I do not mean in the general context, because it is working well for most schools. However, a number of severely disadvantaged schools are losing out because they have many more children with special needs than the national average. This is the nub of this issue.

The Minister is aware of this because she herself recently launched a document called, "Reading Literacy in Disadvantaged Primary Schools", which showed that on average, the level of literacy problems in disadvantaged schools is more than three times that of schools in general and that up to half the children in some schools have severe literacy problems. Hence, the Minister has the evidence to show that the weighted model does not work in schools where there is a high level of disadvantage in which one has a large number of children who require one-to-one help and are considerably below average in terms of literacy and numeracy. This must be addressed in a specific way for these schools.

I suggest the Minister either halves the existing 80:1 ratio or else, which would be preferable, provides the resources to these schools on the basis of need. This can be done by ensuring that there are enough NEPS psychologists to carry out the assessment of need for these children. They will have problems later on in their school careers if they do not receive the requisite attention in the earlier stages of primary school.

I will give an example of something we were told by a teacher last week. In the current context, children in an inner city school, who would have received resources up to now, will no longer do so. This is because although they are below average, they are not at the lowest level. Such children will no longer receive the resources because they are in a disadvantaged school. However, were they to move to one of the more affluent suburbs, where there were fewer children with special needs, they would then receive resource support. While the same child with the same problem would not receive help in a disadvantaged school, he or she would do so in a more advantaged school. There must be something wrong with such a system and I urge the Minister for Education and Science as well as the Minister of State who represents her this evening to ensure that this is addressed so that such children will receive the support they need.

See this speech in context