Batt O'Keeffe (Cork North West, Fianna Fail)

These classes predated my Department's initiative to allocate additional learning teaching supports to schools to enable them to cater for the needs of pupils with high incidence special needs, including a mild general learning disability. My Department has always recognised that pupils with mild general learning disabilities may need additional teaching and care supports to enable them to learn in an integrated setting. My Department's policies in this regard have not changed and the supports are and will be available in schools.

Since 2003, my Department's policy has been to support a more flexible deployment of these resources in primary schools. All pupils, including those with learning disabilities, need to belong to a peer group and to mix with pupils of different levels of ability in a variety of situations. An exclusive reliance on using resource teaching hours for individual tuition only is contrary to the principle of integration in learning and teaching.

My Department has advised primary schools to deploy their allocated special education resources in a way that best accommodates the special educational needs of pupils. It has recommended that wherever possible, schools should provide additional teaching support for pupils in the mainstream classroom or in small groups. Such an approach helps maximise effective and efficient teaching and learning and minimise disruptions to the class programme.

I assure parents that these pupils will receive teaching supports in school. There are now over 8,000 learning support and resource teachers in place in our schools. These teachers support children through a variety of well-established approaches, including co-operation teaching or team teaching, where the support is provided in class to the pupil. There is also withdrawal teaching, where the support is provided on a one-to-one basis or in smaller groups away from the classroom; and differentiation of the curriculum, where the curriculum is modified by both the class and learning support teachers to meet the needs of a particular pupil or group of pupils, among other approaches.

These additional teaching supports are, at primary level, allocated to schools through the general allocation model, known as the GAM, which was introduced in 2005. The general allocation model effectively replaced the special class model for pupils with a mild general learning disability. Instead of being unnecessarily isolated in special class settings, away from their friends, pupils with a mild general learning disability receive additional teaching support from the learning support teacher. Since the general allocation model's introduction, many schools have voluntarily moved to disband their special classes. This decision only addresses those classes where the pupil population was insufficient to retain the teacher. The remaining classes with sufficient pupils will stay in place.

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