Seanad debates
Thursday, 19 February 2015
Commencement Matters
Special Educational Needs Service Provision
10:30 am
Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source
I am delighted it is the Minister who is here. She is the person I need.
My motion concerns the need for the Minister for Education and Skills to recognise that it makes good, sound educational, financial and domestic or family sense to provide resource support hours for children with Down's syndrome who also have a mild learning difficulty classification, and I hope my argument today will prove to her it is time that we changed this policy tout de suite.
From my experience in this area of listening to families as an educator, I make the case that these children's rights are seriously infringed. We are talking about only 200 children in the primary sector who have a mild learning difficulty classification and also have Down's syndrome as a recognised syndrome and disability. It is estimated that there are approximately 25 to 30 such children per year. I am familiar with quite a number of cases in Galway. Indeed, the Minister probably read Brendan O'Connor's article about his daughter in the Sunday Independenton Sunday last.
It has been estimated that this measure would cost the Exchequer approximately €1 million to resource, which, in the whole scheme of things - considering the amount of time involved, the possibility of preventing these children from regressing from mild to moderate learning disability, the investment in their futures and the alleviation of worry for their families - is a very good investment.
I was really struck - I apologise for being personal here - that the Taoiseach hired a liaison person for €50,000 to improve his personal profile in Mayo, for power, I suppose. My thought was that 20 times that amount would give power to these children to participate more fully in society. We need to look at it again.
Let me give the Minister a specific example. Children with mild learning difficulties come in with an IQ of 55 to 70. Such a child would traditionally have been called a slow learner, with lower intellectual capacity and processing. A child I know with a mild learning disability, who also has Down's syndrome, has a significant speech disorder and cannot string sentences together, and has low muscle tone, which makes sitting and attending to tasks difficult, especially those requiring fine motor skills, such as writing. She has sight problems. Indeed, this is typical of Down's syndrome children - more than 50% have sight problems. Glasses, of themselves, do not correct it. They must have a little board right beside them to accommodate their eyesight. Hearing issues are intermittent for some - in other words, their hearing comes and goes. This child I am talking about also suffers from sleep apnoea and is very tired because her oxygen levels are dropping at night. I worked as a primary school teacher for a while in the United States and we were testing out inclusion at the time. I was a mainstream teacher but children were being brought into my class to try out inclusion. This is now 20 years ago. Some of those children had Down's syndrome, and I noticed their tiredness. I noticed that sometimes they needed to be lifted. I noticed that it was difficult for them to keep up. It is an abomination to say that these children are the same as any other child with a mild learning difficulty.
Let me give the Minister another example. This little girl I have just described began to feel stress emotionally at school because she was not learning. Then she was in Crumlin hospital for some of the problems I have described. While she was there, she saw another child with Down's syndrome walk by, and she said: "Oh look. She is like me."This is a five year old child. The stress became so great when she was not keeping up with her peers that she got alopecia and her hair began to fall out. The parents then begged for a second diagnosis - a psychological assessment - because she began to have behavioural and emotional problems, despite having only a mild learning disability with Down's syndrome. When she got the resource hours, guess what? She is transformed. She is now happy, despite only getting three hours extra a week.
There are a myriad of issues with children with mild learning difficulty and Down's syndrome. The child with mild learning difficulty has an awareness. What I have described to the Minister about the child who feels she cannot keep up is the mild child, not the moderate child. The mild category, plus the range of issues that come with Down's syndrome, makes for a very special case. The ombudsman has ruled that the lack of resources in this area is having a negative impact on the experience of such children. However, the NCSE is now coming out and saying that, with the new proposed model, a psychological assessment is not needed at all and that the child's needs will be met. They are not being met. I ask the Minister to change the policy from September 2015.
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