Emer Higgins (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate because services for children with disabilities or additional needs are incredibly important.

Under the umbrella of additional needs come special educational needs. I commend the Minister of State, Deputy Madigan, on the work she has done and the commitment she has shown thus far. Having a dedicated Minister of State for special education is a genuine show of the Government's commitment to improving the lives of children with special educational needs. This area has benefited from having a dedicated Minister of State and, if I may so, from having Deputy Madigan in that role because her empathy, compassion and passion for reform in this area is obvious and badly needed by families up and down this country.

I will raise a couple of the issues I am most commonly approached about. The first is special needs education capacity. I know there has been intensive engagement between the Departments, NCSE, school patrons and school authorities on increasing capacity in Dublin. The NCSE's recently published opinion with regard to section 37A of the Education Act 1998 clearly outlined that there is insufficient capacity in special classes and special schools in the county at primary level. Approximately 80 special class places and 49 special school places are needed. Since June, eight special classes have been sanctioned by the NCSE. This will increase special place capacity for the coming academic year. That reduces the number of school places the NCSE has identified as being needed back down to 56. That is really welcome progress but we need more.

My area, Dublin Mid-West, is full of young people and growing families. The demand for ASD units, the supply of which is currently stretched, is only going to increase. Since 2011, the NCSE has increased the number of special classes by more than 130%, from 548 to 1,456. The great majority of those classes are ASD classes. It is fantastic growth but, based purely on the number of inquiries I get from parents in my area who cannot find a place for their children in an ASD class, we need to provide many more.

I will also raise the need for grants for departmental emergency works to facilitate accessibility to be approved more quickly than the current process allows for. Right now, schools have to wait until they can confirm their allocation of SNAs before they apply for funding for accessibility works to accommodate, for example, students in wheelchairs. That is crazy. Until the funding is in place, the work cannot be carried out. In a particular case I am dealing with, this means that a child who is due to start secondary school in September has not yet been accepted to their local school, which is the school they want to attend and the one all their friends are going to. Why? It is because the school is awaiting a new building from the Department. The existing building is not up to current standards, which means it is not accessible. As a result of the school not being able to apply for an accessibility grant until recently because it did not know its SNA allocation, no decision has yet been made on funding. It is the student and his or her family who are paying the price. They are under enormous stress and strain because of this. This administrative hurdle is a major barrier for children and young people with additional physical needs when it comes to accessing their educational entitlement.

I will also highlight another particular issue I have come across in my area. A group of six children are in a preschool early intervention ASD unit. It is approaching the time for them to go to primary school and five of the six have been offered places in the school, either in the mainstream class or the ASD unit. However, one child was offered no place at all. I have been corresponding with the NCSE on this matter and it is proactively engaging on it but I wanted to take the opportunity to raise with the Minister of State that broader issue because if a child is in an early intervention preschool ASD class in the grounds of a school, there simply must be an ASD place available for him or her when it comes time to go to primary school. That must be guaranteed. We need to put that in place.

Scoil Chrónáin in Rathcoole, which is in my area, was chosen to take part in a pilot scheme to provide in-school and preschool speech and language and occupational therapy services a number of years back. The scheme had a really positive impact and offered a more joined-up approach to delivering services that are tailored to each child's individual needs. I do not know the current status of that scheme but it needs to be revived and rolled out to additional schools, especially schools in the area of community healthcare organisation, CHO, 7.

As the Minister of State will be aware, the CHO 7 area is highly populated and my constituency falls into it. It is notoriously a massively challenged area when it comes to speech and language and occupational therapies and other additional needs supports for children. A student in my constituency recently wrote to me to share her experience of navigating the education system with learning disabilities, namely dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia and developmental language disorder. What struck me most was this child's struggle to get a proper diagnosis. She had spent years of primary and secondary school being told she was not trying hard enough or being passed over by teachers who did not have either the authority or the training to recognise learning disabilities. The student eventually got a private diagnosis in her late teens thanks to the perseverance of her mother. Unfortunately, that will not change the educational disadvantage she has experienced so far.

The State currently spends more than 25% of its annual education and training budget on making additional provision for children with special educational needs. That is an increase of more than 60% since 2011 alone. That is very positive. Budget 2022 provided funding for an additional 1,165 SNAs, an additional 620 new special education teacher posts and 287 additional special classes. The trends in funding are most certainly going in the right direction. I welcome that but we still need more. There are issues with diagnosis. I acknowledge that does not fall under the remit of the Minister of State but, when it comes to learning disabilities, we need stronger pathways within our classrooms to identify the signs of disability and to get quicker diagnoses. There is no doubt that we are making great progress in the area of special education. The discussion, the policies, the funding and everything else is moving in the right direction but there are still massive challenges. I know there is political will from the Minister of State and her Department to meet these challenges head on and to deliver a reformed service for the children who so badly need it.

See this speech in context