Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The context of this debate is the fact, confirmed by the Ombudsman for Children, that the State is failing children with special needs. The Department of Education is failing such children and it is an absolute scandal. The children still being failed the most are the more than 100 children who do not have appropriate school places for September. It is now 1 July and that is a matter of a small number of months away.

The State is failing many more children with special needs than that. In reality, as regards what should be done, the State is failing the thousands of children who have to go to school outside their local communities on a daily basis. Every day in Dublin, for example, taxis criss-cross each other throughout the city to bring children to their schools. It is an absolute scandal. The Government has responsibility for it, as do previous Governments. The bottom line point should be that all schools in the State that receive State funding should have to provide for the education of all children with additional special needs. All children should be served by their local publicly-funded school. There should be no basis for that not to happen where resources are provided and no situation where there are requests or whatever. It is a basic thing that schools provide education for children in their local area, including those with special needs, which means resourcing special classes.

I pay tribute to the campaigners, parents and many different groups of activists who have been fighting for the rights of their children. Part of the reason we are having the debate is the Government feels under pressure on this issue. Hundreds of parents have attended meetings throughout the country about the needs of their children and have spoken out, very powerfully, about the crisis they face. We have to remember these parents are fighting for their children's rights on a day-to-day basis. They are not just fighting when it comes to the Department of Education and schooling, but also in getting the necessary therapy from the HSE and so on. Their lives are often difficult enough without taking time to join protests outside Leinster House or the GPO, or to go to local public meetings, but they do so because they are determined to fight for their children to get the education and healthcare they deserve. These parents have created an environment where this has become a major political issue and the Government has been under pressure.

It is worth tracing the pretty inglorious recent history of how the Government has attempted to deal with this scandal in the past couple of months. We have to go back to May, when the Minister of State announced that the Government was considering establishing special education needs centres as an emergency response to the shortage of school places for children with special educational needs. That went down very badly, understandably, with parents, activist groups, and organisations such as AsIAm and Inclusion Ireland.

They rightly said this was a very bad proposal to effectively warehouse children with special needs, separate to our schools, which went against the idea of mainstreaming and integration that we wanted to have. Inclusion Ireland responded that, "this 'emergency' plan seems like ten steps backwards on the path to inclusive education. Inclusion Ireland was not contacted or consulted in any way about these measures". AsIAm stated, "The lack of appropriate school placements is due in part to the culmination of a lack of forward planning, forward thinking and coordination by a number of key stakeholders." That proposal appears, thankfully, to have been dropped.

However, it is difficult not to see what happened at the weekend, in respect of the naming of schools, in that context. There is growing pressure from below from parents, activists and kids who have simply had enough and are demanding appropriate education. The Minister came forward with a very poor proposal that was shot down very quickly and then there seems to have been an attempt to effectively punch downwards at schools, principals and teachers, to distract from the Government's responsibility in the regard and its failures.

That led us to the situation over the weekend of the naming of four schools, all of which were DEIS schools and the Minister of State's claim that the decision to name the schools had been made because they were "not engaging at all" with the Department and were "just ignoring correspondence". What she stated was not true. We have been in touch with one of the four schools, which said that it has a paper trail of engagement with the NCSE officials that goes back to October 2021. The school said that the last discussion with officials on the ground was about progressing the plans for special needs classes and the officials are on the record as telling the school that they were happy with the level of engagement on providing these classes. The school already provides a moderate-needs class and is working towards a new building to provide more in September 2023, yet, with no warning, the Minister of State named this school and three others.

The only explanation for this is that it was designed to distract from the failures of the Government and the Minister of State. Notably, when the evidence emerged in the correspondence that had been responded to and the engagement that was taking place, she changed what she said. She said from her perspective, they were "ignoring the import of the correspondence". That is obviously quite different from "just ignoring correspondence". It is quite a different statement in reality. I raised this with the Minister of State during parliamentary questions yesterday. I gave her two opportunities in the questions I raised to apologise to the schools and she did not take those opportunities. I encourage her, in terms of putting this behind everybody and moving forward, hopefully, on a more positive basis, to withdraw the false allegations, apologise to the schools, the principals and the teachers, and proceed to provide the necessary resources.

I will give an example of the very real, ongoing crisis that parents and their kids face. I have raised the example with the Minister of State a couple of times because it seems to be striking. Throughout the country, we have a problem in access to special education classes and getting places for kids, but she seems to have a particular problem in terms of post-primary schools in Dublin 24, where the ratio of primary schools with special education classes to post-primary schools with special education classes is significantly less than and wildly out of whack with the national ratio. We have 17 primary schools offering special education classes, but only two post-primary schools with special education classes, from September.

Throughout the country, the ratio of 2.3:1 or 2.4:1, whereas it is a fraction of that in Dublin 24. There is also a nationwide crisis because an absence of summer programmes . This creates a real crisis for parents over the summer, especially those parents who cannot access in-school programmes. The Tallaght Parents Autism Support Groups surveyed its members in terms of those who have managed to secure a home tutor. Approximately 50% have not yet been able to secure a home tutor and 35% say home tuition does not work for their child. Only one in five says that home tuition worked for their child and they were able to secure a home tutor.

Regarding what needs to happen, we first need to have a centralised place where all the information is contained. We need a centralised database of all the needs of children for special education, to avoid a situation in which, months away from a new school year, we realise that there is a crisis and that 100 children do not have special education classes. That simply should not happen. It is very possible to plan to avoid that.

The NCSE and the Department do not have access to a national database on which they can project the numbers and location of children who will require special education facilities. It is not that such information is not available. Clearly, it exists in different discrete places. It is not that many of our public servants are not working extremely hard with those children and the families to provide what they need; it is that the State has not bothered, over years, to think it necessary to compile such a database in order that we could know, in advance, the numbers and the needs facing schools each year, instead of lurching from crisis to crisis.

The final issue is resources, which are at the bottom of much of this. The most compelling reason we have children with special education needs without access to education, many of whom also do not have access to the necessary healthcare and other services, is years of Government neglect. In the vast majority of cases when dealing with education, schools are not to blame for the shortage of spaces. The Department and a lack of Government funding are responsible.

An important context is that Irish schools are overcrowded and underfunded. It has been mentioned that when the NCSE or the Department identifies a space for a special class, it may actually be a school library or room that will be vacated by a teacher who will then operate from a corridor. Very few schools are sitting on suitable spaces and refusing to accommodate special classes. The four schools that were named and shamed illustrate this. They have special classes and are doing important work in providing inclusive education for their communities. We, therefore, we need the resources to ensure that parents and children get the properly-planned, spacious and adequately-kitted-out classrooms to which they should be entitled. This is best done by allowing schools, teachers, principals, parents and students to discuss and articulate their needs and then undertake to meet those needs, in a timely and wholehearted way, rather than doing special education on a shoestring and having the diversionary approach of pointing to or attempting to blame particular schools for problems that are mostly the responsibility of Government.

Today, we are moving to begin the process of speeding up the section 37A process. Many other processes need to be speeded up, as well. We need to speed up the review process for schools that challenge in adequate staffing in their classrooms and access to assessment and therapies for children. More than 34,000 children were waiting more than a year to access a community health service up to the end of September 2021. Can the Minister of State, please, act to speed that up immediately? The services that children were waiting for spanned several disciplines, including psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, ophthalmology, audiology, dietetics and CAMHS. Can access to them be speeded up? Can the waiting lists for assessments and therapies be speeded up? Children are waiting years for specialist services.

Can we speed up the reorganisation of disability services for children? This reorganisation currently has the look of simply rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. We have a situation where one quarter of the staff positions on the new child disability network teams remain unfilled. Can we please speed up the filling of those posts? A recent Inclusion Ireland survey found that more than a half of children with disabilities were not in receipt of any service or therapy. Can we please speed up dealing with that? Can we have an emergency session of the Dáil next Friday to deal with it?

The OECD reports every single year that Irish classrooms are overcrowded and underfunded. While the Government will counter that we have more special education teachers and SNAs than ever before, the population in our schools is growing. The identification of children with special needs and the number of children with special needs is growing. We have a scandal as it stands and there is a complete failure by the State to provide for the education of children with special education needs. We need to address that and we need to know that problem will not go away. It will get worse unless the key thing is done, that is, resources are put in place. We must work with schools to resource them and ensure there is a suitable place for all young people. We must ensure everyone gets the education and healthcare he or she is entitled to.

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