Seán Connick (Wexford, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate and to highlight the record-breaking investment the Government and previous Fianna Fáil-led Administrations have made, and will continue to make, in the area of education.

All children must have an educational experience that is tailored to their individual needs and abilities. From a policy point of view, this requires the Government and all its partners within the education system to develop a mixture of different educational responses appropriate to the needs of children in varying circumstances.

In the past nine years, the ability of the education system to meet the requirements of children with special needs has greatly improved. Since the Government took the decision in 1998 to provide an automatic response to children with special needs, investment in this area has multiplied. In the current year alone, investment in special education will be over €820 million. This represents an increase of over 30% on the amount allocated in the 2006 Estimates.

There are now over 6,000 primary school teachers working directly with children with special needs, compared with just 1,500 in 1998. The number of special needs assistants has increased from 300 to over 8,800 since that date. In addition, there has also been a substantial increase — from 200 in 1998 to 2,450 at present — in the number of whole-time equivalent teachers who support second level students with special needs.

The establishment of the National Council for Special Education and the decision to place special educational needs organisers in local areas means that for the first time parents and teachers have local support to help them obtain the appropriate responses for their children. The roll-out of the Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act will see further improvements in services for children with special needs. The Act provides for educational assessment for children with special needs and gives them an entitlement to an individual educational plan. It also gives parents recourse to an independent appeals body that will have the power to compel organisations such as the HSE to take specific actions relating to children's requirements.

One of the most important advances in recent years in providing an individually tailored educational response to children with special needs has been the provision of resource teachers to primary schools. For the past two years, each school has been allocated resource teaching hours based on its enrolment numbers. This is a significant improvement on the previous system of requiring children to undergo a psychological assessment before being allocated resource teaching hours. The latter often caused long delays in providing children with the support they needed. With resource teachers placed in schools, children can now access the support they need immediately.

We have also seen a substantial investment in recent years in psychological assessments of schoolchildren. In the past school year alone, the Department of Education and Science paid for over 10,000 individual psychological assessments to be carried out on schoolchildren. A total of 5,800 were carried out in that period by the Department of Education and Science's NEPS psychologists. In addition, the Department paid for a further 4,400 assessments to be carried out privately, at a cost of €1.5 million, through the scheme for commissioning private assessments. I welcome the fact that although the number of NEPS psychologists has trebled since 1999, the Department is still committed to increasing that number from its current level of 134 to 200 by 2009.

Another important development has been the increase in the number of speech and language therapy students. Additional courses in speech and language therapy have been established in three universities, University College Cork, NUI Galway and the University of Limerick, with an initial uptake of 25 places on each course. This represents an increase in training capacity from 25 to 105 speech and language therapy students.

The availability of suitably qualified speech and language therapists is of great concern to many parents. I wish to refer to an example from my constituency. St. Patrick's special school in Enniscorthy is the only special education school for the entire county of Wexford. St. Patrick's special school requires two full-time speech and language therapists. However, the school receives an allocation of only seven sessions of speech and language therapy per week. In a school of 133 students, this gives each student minimal exposure to speech and language therapy on a weekly basis. While I recognise that nationally the amount of speech and language therapists employed in the public health service has increased substantially in the past ten years from 281 whole-time equivalents in 1997 to 648 in 2006, this area has the potential to benefit further when the new university speech and language graduates come into the health system. I particularly hope that some of these new graduates will be allocated to St. Patrick's special school in Enniscorthy.

I welcome the many developments which have taken place over the past number of years on the provision of educational services to children with special needs and I commend the Ministers for Education and Science and Health and Children for their commitments to this sector. I hope both Ministers continue to prioritise special needs education.

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