Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is good to see this Bill coming before the House, although it is a shame it is happening on 1 July amid a bundle of other legislation that is coming through the House at breakneck speed as we rattle towards the Dáil recess. I accept what the Minister of State said about amendments. We have two amendments that will be submitted in the name of Deputy Ó Ríordáin that I might send directly to the Minister of State in an attempt to improve this much-needed and important Bill, which has the capability to bring about quite strong structural legislative change regarding the progression of much-needed school places.

Will it be enough for 100-plus pupils waiting on places for this September? The answer is probably not, which is why I would like clarity from the Minister of State in her closing remarks about the proposal that has not been totally discounted, namely, the warehousing proposal involving centres of special education. Are they still on the table or will they not go ahead? We hope they will not because the plans outlined were totally inadequate.

All this is happening as emergency legislation at the start of July 2022 because we are and have been failing when it comes to providing special needs education. I am not just talking about pupils who do not have spaces for the coming September. There are 15,500 children and young people forced to leave their catchment areas, some travelling in excess of 100 km, to access education. We heard of a number of different cases over recent weeks. During the debate on the Labour Party's Autism Bill on Wednesday, we spoke about families who have had to go to 25 different schools to get a place, which is a real failure on the part of our entire system. Among students who have found a place, some have to operate on reduced timetables, which again does not meet their needs and is not equitable treatment of young people who at the very least need basic equality with their peers but are not receiving it.

This imbalance of rights needs to be addressed and this Bill has the capacity to do so, but it needs to be followed through not just with the Minister of State pushing and activating it but also with the schools and their boards of management and patron bodies getting on board. It is all well and good for Opposition spokespeople or Deputies to talk about how everything is a failure but it is the special needs educators who are saying it loudly as well. There was a very strong letter in The Irish Timesyesterday from Grace Shorten, who works as a special education teacher in a mainstream school, describing how she and her colleagues in her school and other schools do their best to meet the needs of their pupils with additional needs, with a great deal of time spent preparing, teaching and learning, and the extra work they do fighting with the Department and other State services for basic needs.

The Minister of State said that if a special class is created, the Department will give resources in terms of schools and special needs assistants, SNAs, and mentioned the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, being involved. This all sounds great if it is delivered, but the reality is NEPS and HSE services are so chronically underfunded and understaffed that children are languishing on waiting lists. We all have the discussions about waiting lists. Waiting lists do not exist in isolation. These children are awaiting special education provision. Children with serious mental health difficulties are not even placed on a child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, waiting list because they do not meet the criteria, which we all know are undefined and, to use the words of Grace Shorten in her letter, mysterious. If they do secure a place on the list, they could be waiting years and age out of the particular service. Very spurious reasons for rejecting applications for assistive technologies are given, denying a child access to a potentially life-changing laptop for the sake of saving the Department of Education a few hundred euro.

They are the realities of what special education teachers are experiencing. It is not about the work they are doing in the class, which is difficult, challenging, rewarding and of the utmost value. Rather it is about the fight they have after hours with the Department for basic services and the waiting lists across other areas. For this Bill to work, all these services and resources need to be put in place. The letter from Grace Shorten ended by talking about how this was the context in which the unedifying issue about the naming of the four schools by the Minister of State occurred. The naming of the schools was completely regrettable, should not have happened and should never happen again. If for any reason the Minister of State needs to interact with a school about this or any other issue, it should not take place in the media but should take place directly with the school. The Minister and the Minister of State have enough powerful levers to do that effectively. We need to move on from that and get this Bill passed. We will take the Minister of State at her word when she says she will engage with the amendments that will come through. Sinn Féin is bringing forward five while we are bringing forward two. I am sure there will be a number of others. We are not talking about dozens of amendments. There will be a small number of amendments and they should be given due time and consideration because we all want to make this work not just for the students waiting for places in September but all the students who will come on with additional needs in the coming months and years so that we are not here next July with other emergency legislation or longer waiting lists or having the same conversation again.

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