Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

According to census 2016, the level of education completed by disabled people was substantially lower than that of non-disabled people. It reports that 13.7% of disabled persons aged 15 to 50 have completed no higher than primary-level education compared with 4.2% of the general population. As we can see from this statistic, many barriers to inclusivity remain within the education system for persons with disabilities. Children with additional educational needs must be assisted to enable them to progress through and leave school with the skills necessary to participate in an inclusive way in the social and economic activities of society and live independent and fulfilled lives.

The Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs, EPSEN, Act was passed in 2004 with the aim of ensuring that children with additional educational needs could be educated in an inclusive setting and that all children would have the right to be educated in a mainstream school unless it would not be in the best interest of the child or the effective of provision of education for other children in mainstream education. Unfortunately, almost 19 years after the Act was passed, several of the main sections of the Act that would have benefited children with additional educational needs have yet to be commenced.

One such section that has not been commenced is the provision of individual education plans, IEPs. An IEP is considered best practice internationally. Along with appropriate assessments and supports, IEPs are crucial in realising meaningful inclusion of children with additional education needs in school. An IEP is a written document prepared for a named student that specifies the learning goals that are to be achieved by the student over a set period as well as the teaching strategies and resources and supports necessary to achieve those goals. This should be prepared by the school in consultation with the student, if possible, and with the parents and other stakeholders such as the therapist the student may be attending.

As a consequence of this and other sections of the Act not being implemented, children's rights are at the whim of policymakers, changes in Government, funding priorities and other factors. Parents of children can often find themselves lost in the system with little leverage and limited, if any, redress when the needs of their children are not met. This stands in direct contradiction of Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, which the Government signed up to in 2018, within which it states that "States Parties shall ensure that ... persons with disabilities are not excluded from the general education system on the basis of disability." The level of inclusion outlined in Article 24 of the UNCRPD cannot even begin to be reached if the basic structures and execution for IEPs is not available as standard in schools. While it is currently the case that many teachers prepare IEPs for their students, and the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, has guidelines in place on how to prepare a plan, this is not compulsory, and they are not inspected. The quality of such plans varies significantly, therefore, and many schools do not provide IEPs at all.

The ineffectiveness of the current model of special educational needs, SEN, provision and the lack of a standard individual assessment plan and supports for children with additional educational needs in school is also sustaining the lack of mainstream placement as a first option. This compounds the situation and results in parents and children having to travel significantly without transport supports, dependence on reduced timetabling, exclusion and home tuition, over-concentration of pupils with disabilities in schools designated as disadvantaged, an incoherent approach to reasonable accommodation in examinations and the absence of a transition approach where children are offered mainstream primary class but none in post-primary.

Children with special educational needs who are segregated throughout primary and post-primary education have no meaningful access to the local school and continue on a segregated path to day services with a lack of further education and employment opportunities. This leads to a lack of quality-of-life outcome for these children.

In his recent report of the lack of availability of school places, the Ombudsman for Children stated: "All decisions made and actions taken from this time forth should be about building a strong, inclusive education system which is fully supportive of all our children equally." The steps we take now have to build toward that vision.

This Bill, which I introduced in 2021 along with my party colleagues, Deputies Guirke and Ó Laoghaire, concentrates on individual education plans and seeks to amend the Education Act 1998 to grant additional functions to the inspectorate to examine and report to the Minister for Education on the prevalence and standard of IEPs for children with special educational needs on an annual basis. The non-implementation of IEPs has severely impacted disabled people as evidenced in research undertaken by AHEAD into the transition of blind and visually impaired students to third-level education. This research identified the lack of IEP provision as the most significant challenge to ensuring appropriate access to supports and resources for students at post-primary level. This research affirms what is identified in census 2016, which is that only 37% of disabled people aged 15 to 50 were educated to third level compared with 53.4% of non-disabled people.

The EPSEN Act came into law in July 2004. With this signing into law came great hope for children with additional education needs and their families. It contained many useful provisions, but the reality is that in 2023, we are still waiting for the Act to be fully implemented. For years now, advocacy groups have been calling for a review of the Act, which enshrines certain educational protections for children with additional education needs into law. The review is under way and this, ultimately, must ensure that the Act is fit for purpose, aligns with education and disability policy development since the Act was first introduced in 2004. This should have been conducted, in my opinion and that of many disabled persons organisations, DPOs, in conjunction with a review of the Disability Act 2005 to also bring it into line with policy development since it was enacted while safeguarding the rights enshrined within it to an assessment of need. However, we have no idea how long this review will take. In the meantime, it is essential that we put procedures in place that will assist disabled people in their journey through the education system and enable them to progress with the skills necessary to participate in an inclusive way in the social and economic activities of society and live independent and fulfilled lives. With that in mind, I urge the Minister of State to support the passage of the Bill today.

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