Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

I am being very accurate. I do not even need to listen to the Minister's comments.

Currently there is a threat that 1,200 special needs assistants, SNAs, will be withdrawn from the schools throughout the country. The NCSE office told me this morning that, after the completion of reviews in 1,000 schools, 300 SNAs had already been withdrawn, with resource hours. The Government's policy of inclusion will fall apart completely, unless it provides a level playing field for children with special educational needs. The idea behind providing SNAs as part of the Government's policy on inclusion was to provide the child with special needs a level playing field to give him or her a reasonable chance to keep up in mainstream classes. I ask the Minister to indicate how this can happen in the absence of an SNA or without the provision of an adequate number of resource hours. It is fine if he takes them away but other supports must be put in their places. It is not fair to expect a teacher to cope alone. Some teachers have three or four children with special needs in a mainstream classroom. This will cause teachers to reach breaking point.

I spoke to staff in a few schools today. I remember a teacher who came to see me a year ago from a school in Galway city. He had a class of 30 pupils, six of whom had special educational needs, with one borderline case. Three of the children had Asperger's syndrome; two had associated disorders; another had a speech and language disorder; two had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and one had borderline general learning difficulties, for which, as the Minister knows, there is no diagnosis. The class in question had 1.5 SNAs and I asked the teacher how he managed. I made a case for the appointment of an extra teacher, as did many others, but he did not get receive one. How did he manage with 23 children in the normal spectrum and a number with special educational needs? He told me he had to split the class into two, each with 15 pupils. Having added the resource hours, the principal found the class was due 26 hours. He took a resource teacher away from resource teaching and made that teacher teach in the classroom. This was creative work done which the school could not declare to the Department because if it had been so declared, the teacher would not have been able to manage. Chances are, such a process would have been knocked on the head. That is the process with which schools, teachers and kids are grappling. I asked the teacher about the ongoing SNA review and he told me it was a hatchet job on our children. The principal of another school said the same. As far as she was concerned, it was all about numbers. Cutting numbers seems to be the main concern in the review. Special education needs organisers, SENOs, are wondering what can be cut.

In one school there is a child who runs away a lot. It is a DEIS band 2 school, with 20 children in each class, a very good pupil-teacher ratio. The eight year old in question regularly runs away from school such that if the teacher was to follow without an SNA in the classroom, the other 19 would be left unattended. I grant that the case is unusual but when it was put to the SENO, the school was told to put more locks on the doors. How about that for behaviour modification? A child in another school in Galway city climbs trees and walls and the solution lof the SENO was to cut down the trees. Will the Minister follow up on such advice from special education needs organisers? It does not address the problem. There is more concern for cutting numbers. Many other speakers will say the same today.

The biggest problem is that children's educational rights have been infringed. The Fianna Fáil-led Government and the Minister's Department, in particular, have not yet implemented the EPSEN Act. Nothing is legally binding, despite the Act being in place since 2004. The failure to implement it has maimed children in an educational sense because they have no rights in law. When will the Act be implemented in full? This morning I spoke with a staff member at the NCSE office and was told very little of the Act had been implemented, that major parts remained untouched. The individual education plan, IEP, is not yet a legal requirement. Until each child diagnosed with a special educational need has a legal right to an IEP, his or her rights remain unprotected. I would like to hear the Minister's plan in that respect. I was also told it was very difficult to allocate resource hours for children with multiple disabilities.