Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

Equally, the number of teachers working solely with children with special needs has increased to 9,000 fully qualified teachers. The continued support for them and our special schools has helped education throughout the country and has also helped children and the provision of excellent service to children with varying degrees of need.

Many of these improvements have come about in the past ten years and many in the past three years. Significant improvements have taken place since I became the Minister for Education and Science because I made it a priority. This needed to be developed following the work of my predecessors, Deputy Martin's work on automatic response, and Deputy Noel Dempsey's introduction of legislation. This had to be built on but no work had been done by a previous Minister until 1997. In the past three years, investment in special needs has doubled to over €900 million this year. In the same period, 6,000 of the additional special education staff have been appointed, 4,000 special needs assistants and 2,000 teachers.

The application process has been completely overhauled. It is no longer a centralised system whereby one had to apply to the Department. It is more customer friendly, more user friendly and more family friendly because we now have 82 special needs organisers working locally. At least people need not contact the Department centrally but can have their concerns and needs met at a local level.

Every primary school in the country has an allocation of resource teachers based on its enrolment figures. This means the needs of children with what we call high-incidence special needs, namely, the more frequently seen special needs, and those who have learning difficulties such as dyslexia can be met immediately in the school.