Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The procedures for accessing extra support have also been improved with the establishment of the National Council for Special Education and its team of local special educational needs organisers, SENOs. Through this service, parents and teachers have, for the first time, local personnel to help them obtain the appropriate support for their children. All of these improvements have been made possible by a significant increase in funding. Over €820 million is being provided for special education this year. This amounts to €180 million, or nearly30%, more than what was provided in the 2006 Estimates.

Further improvements in services are on the way with the roll-out of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act which provides for an educational assessment for children with special needs and the entitlement to an individual educational plan. It also provides for parents to be consulted and informed at different stages of the process. Parents will also have recourse to an independent appeals board which will have the power to compel bodies, including the Health Service Executive, to take specific actions to address matters before it.

Guidelines on devising and implementing individual education plans have been issued to schools by the council. It is the council's intention that these guidelines will provide a benchmark for best practice pending full implementation of the Act and thatschools will use them to draw up school policies and procedures on individual education plans in advance of the mandatory requirement for them to do so.

A further significant development in recent years that has reduced the need for assessments has been the introduction of the general allocation model of providing resource teachers for primary schools. Since September 2005 all schools have been allocated resource teaching hours based on their enrolment figures to support children with high incidence special needs and learning difficulties. The reasoning behind the introduction of the general allocation model was simple. Children with special needs such as dyslexia or mild learning difficulties are found in almost every school. It, therefore, makes sense that every school should have a number of resource teaching hours based on the number of pupils in the school, while recognising the special additional requirements of boys' schools and schools in disadvantaged areas. This is a major improvement on the previous system, under which every child required a psychological assessment before being given resource teaching hours. This was a time-consuming process that often led to delays in children getting the support they needed. Resource teachers are now in place in the school from the start of the first term; thus children who need their assistance can avail of it immediately. Early intervention is facilitated by the fact that the resources are in place when the child enrols.

Individual allocations for pupils with special educational needs arising from more severe learning disabilities continue to be made. These are being processed by the National Council for Special Education. On the need for assessments, it should also be noted that the NEPS, in common with other psychological services, encourages a staged assessment process, whereby each school takes responsibility for initial assessment, educational planning and remedial intervention in consultation with its assigned NEPS psychologist. It is only if there is a failure to make reasonable progress, in spite of the school's best efforts, that a child should be referred for individual psychological assessment. This system allows the psychologists to give early attention to urgent cases and also to help many more children indirectly than could be seen individually.

The NEPS has recently produced a set of guidelines and resource pack for primary school teachers which outlines such a graduated problem solving model of assessment and intervention. It comprises three distinct processes, at the levels of the classroom, school support and external support to the school.

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