Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)

I very much commend the Labour Party on its motion. We have a situation in this country where families are increasingly having to become almost full-time campaigners for their children's basic needs because of a failure by successive Governments to forward plan. The impact of this failure on the families of children with additional needs is immense. It is bringing many parents to breaking point.

Transitioning to primary or secondary school is a very significant stage in any child's journey through life. It can involve many challenges around fitting in with peers, adapting to a different structure of study and generally moving forward in his or her development. For a child with additional needs, even in the best of circumstances where supports are in place and there is a good school near home, the challenges are often far greater. What we see throughout the country are children making that momentous step into primary and secondary school with no clarity for many months in advance regarding where they will attend school or how long their school commute will be. There are huge quality of life implications for those children and their families, including mental health implications.

We are seeing children dislocated from their communities for their schooling at a very sensitive stage of development, as a result of which their parents come under enormous additional strain. We need an emergency response to the crisis in special education. We need to see special education placements and staff funded on a systematic per population basis, not according to whether there happens to be a group of families in a position to campaign for a school in their local area over many years. In some cases, the children of those campaigners will have aged out by the time the school materialises. This haphazard way of planning for our communities, where we have a patchwork of school placements that are repeatedly over capacity and under-resourced has to end.

Other aspects of our special education system add immense unnecessary stress and tedium to parents who are already under so much pressure. These need to be addressed urgently. The advocacy group Families Unite for Services and Support, FUSS, has highlighted, for instance, the administrative burden of not having a centralised application process. That means some families are forced to fill out multiple lengthy application forms because each school has autonomy over its enrolments. FUSS, which is made up of parents of children with disabilities, has done enormously valuable work in this area, drawing on its experience of navigating a broken system, and has set out a range of actions that the Government could pursue to resolve the interconnected crises across disability services and special education. FUSS has backed that up with extensive data and in-depth analysis. The Minister and Minister of State could relieve themselves of much of the burden on their shoulders if they were to give FUSS, and ground-level clinicians, teaching staff and SNA representative groups, leading consultative roles in reforming our special education and disability services.

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