Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this legislation and thank the Minister and Minister of State for progressing it so far. It is very positive legislation. I spent 16 years in the classroom. This Bill is good as it proposes to truncate the section 37A process and ensure that schools are fully adhering to the requirement to take in children with special needs. The EPSEN Act did a massively positive thing more than a decade ago. It ensured that children with special educational needs were schooled locally in mainstream education in the environment they were nurtured in. They were invited to play dates and experienced everything else that growing up and being a child is all about.

This legislation is positive and it will be very welcome, but I wish to speak about other matters. When I was home in County Clare yesterday, I visited a school on its final day of term. Its staff told me the money raised in their school's bake sale has been used to secure a private psychological assessment for a child in the school whose family could not afford it. It is very important to point out it is not so much about buildings, SNAs and staffing. The Minister, the Minister of State and the Department have very much stepped up to the plate, with a massive 60% increase in funding since 2011. That is unquestionable. It is about the pathways into special education intervention, such as NEPS and CAMHS. We need to build a capacity within schools.

When I trained in Mary Immaculate College, a parallel course operated beside ours. We were studying education while they were doing education and psychology. Yet, within the classroom environment, there is no pathway for graduates to fully utilise and apply the psychological skills they have. The progressing disability services, PDS, programme educational psychology graduates we have in schools need to be made an in-school resource for pastoral care, counselling and screening assessment. We can then, somehow, bypass NEPS and CAMHS to some degree.

I will commend St. Tola's National School in Shannon on being one of two schools in the country that has a multi-disability class. The body politic always talks about ASD units, and that is so important, but it is only one disability across a spectrum of disabilities. The model in St. Tola's is one we need to replicate throughout the country. I again thank the Minister and the Minister of State.

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