Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to raise the issue of what I believe is discrimination against children who started primary school in 2016 and those who will start in 2017 from consideration and allocation of resources under the new special education teaching resource model. The Minister will be aware that I raised this with the Minister in a parliamentary question on 3 May 2017 on this very topic. Parents and teachers who are concerned about the new system have told me that it is a new system of combining what was learning support, which was specific to the needs of a particular child, and high incidence special education needs. These are now being combined under this new special education resource teaching model. That might sound well and good, but my problem, and that of many parents and teachers, is the assessment upon which the information is based. The problem is going to be very serious for the first two years. The difficulty is that the Department has made allocations to schools which are fairly rigid for the next two years. It would be an extraordinarily exceptional situation for a school to be able to make a case to win an appeal to have its allocation changed under this model.

Last autumn, schools were asked to submit information and the allocation was announced on 7 March 2017. The circulars that were issued from the Department, one to the primary schools and the other to second level schools, outlining the full details of the scheme and a letter followed on how to go about an appeal.

The issue I am highlighting is that children who started in 2016 did not have any medical or professional assessment at that point, so their needs could not have been taken into consideration when these matters were being considered last winter and before the allocation was announced in March this year. They had not yet found their way into the system, they were brand new in their new schools in junior infants. That is a very bad situation but we will also find that children with specific problems starting next September who have not had a previous diagnosis will find there is no extra allocation in their schools.

What confounded me about the Minister's reply to the parliamentary question is that when I highlighted those two specific issues, the Minister said, "The new allocations to schools will include provision to support all pupils in the schools, including where a child receives a diagnosis after the allocation is received by a school, or where there are newly enrolling pupils to the school." He is saying that the allocation will include those whose information was not there, because they did not have a diagnosis.

The Minister went on to say, "For students who start school from September 2017, with a specific diagnosis, either in junior infants or transferring from another school, the resources they need will already be in the school under the new model." The Minister is telling me, the parents and the teachers that he is psychic - that was the school's response to me. The Minister had made an allocation based on the information he had last year and in his written reply he said that if children starting in 2017 have a specific diagnosis, the resources will already be there based on the previous allocation which he had issued. The Minister is saying he knew those children were going to present. He did not know they were going to present, he could not have known they were going to present. Reading that, the school principal said that the only way the Minister could know that is if he thinks he is psychic. I want the Minister to be flexible with the appeals system. That is it in a nutshell. There is no other route for parents to get this matter administered. I do not want a rigid appeals system, I want flexibility.

See this speech in context