Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North-Central, Fianna Fail)

I am here asking a number of questions and the Minister of State may or may not have some of the answers. It is important to raise the issue once again and to highlight the problems we are likely to encounter in advance of September and the intake of students into special schools.

The Minister of State is obviously aware that there was a pilot scheme to reintroduce therapists, OT, physio, speech and language therapists, etc., into special schools, initially run in Cork and Dublin, with three special schools in Cork and five or six special schools in Dublin. It is something that at this stage is universally agreed should never have been taken out of schools in terms of the introduction of PDS and how that model has basically failed to deliver for students and families alike. That said, the pilot scheme has been up and running for six or seven months at this stage. I would have advocated strongly on behalf of a school in Cork, St. Killian's Special School in Mayfield, where, after a lengthy campaign, it was successful in being allowed to procure privately the therapists it needed because it was excluded from the initial intake in the special pilot scheme.

Where are we at with the pilot scheme? Given we have a commitment from Government that therapists will be reintroduced at all levels into all special schools in the country, and I understand that will most likely be done on a phased basis, where we are with the pilot with the seven or eight schools that were initially selected last year? As far as I am concerned, the pilot is surely moot at this stage. If we are allocating all the therapists to all schools, is the pilot for those that were chosen for it last year essentially scrapped and defunct at this stage? If it is, that is fine because it is merely the reality of where we are at because we are reintroducing therapists to all schools. It is important to establish on a factual basis where we are with that pilot.

The difficulty we are likely to face with some of the schools that have been placed on that pilot as of last September is that the majority of them still have teams that do not have their full complement of staff. In all three cases in Cork, they have struggled to appoint the full complement of staff in the six months the pilot scheme has been up and running. My concern is, if we are putting therapists back into all special schools, given we have struggled to appoint staff to the three in Cork that were selected, and Cork has 14 or 15 special schools in total, what is the likelihood of us successfully staffing all those other schools if we cannot even do it successfully in the three that were selected for the pilot? In fairness, that is the concern being expressed by most parents and families in those schools that are affected.

I understand the Minister for Education and Youth, Deputy McEntee, would have made statements recently about the national therapy service and how it is highlighted in the programme for Government that this scheme will be rolled out to all schools. However, can we get down to the phasing of it, how she will staff it, and whether certain roles will be prioritised, be those speech and language therapy, physio, nurses or whatever the case may be? Is there any kind of roadmap for how we are to staff it and successfully implement it in all the special schools?

See this speech in context