Tony Mulcahy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I support Senator Paschal Mooney's call for a debate on special needs assistants. We sometimes get lost in making global statements on special needs assistants and refer to cases where one is minding or helping to mind seven children. One might be all that is needed as there is a teacher in the class also. I can talk from experience because I was in this position with my daughter. There was one teacher with two special needs assistants and seven children of varying ability and with varying difficulties in the class. There is a raft of issues to be considered. I heard RTE interview a school principal one night. On being asked whether she had a special needs assistant, she said she did not but would love one. There actually has to be a child in the school with special needs before it can get a special needs assistant. I know of schools where the special needs assistants are minding classes and running the shop part-time and have functions that are not theirs. A school might require 40 to 60 hours of special needs assistance, but next year the children might have moved. There is an absolute need for a debate and an understanding of what is occurring in this area.

There is a much more serious problem in preschools, where there is no support, other than for six hours per week. There is a double-barrelled problem in that in many cases it is the person running the preschool who identifies that a child has a special need. She sends the child to early service providers and then he or she is sent back to the general practitioner, etc. By the time he or she goes through this process, it may be time to leave preschool. It should be an issue for the Department of Education and Skills right from the time the child is born, rather than having part of the responsibility lie with HSE and the other with the Department.

Recently there was a case in which a child needed an educational aid. A report was written by a clinically qualified educational psychologist, but that, in turn, was overruled by the special educational needs officer from the NCSE because she decided he did not need the aid. I rang the Department and asked whether there was a cut in funding and the exact words used in response were that there was a bucket of money in the Department for educational aids and supports. Despite this, the officer made the decision that the child should not receive the aid. I rang her boss and the decision was overturned. Four paragraphs were written by the educational psychologist on why the child should have what effectively turned out to be an iPad and how it would benefit them in the future. The parent should not have had to contact me to get what the child was absolutely entitled to and what would have been available had the special educational needs officer not overruled the decision. I do not know why we need the NCSE and certainly do not know why we need the special educational needs officers because they are overruling decisions. I do not see any reason the principal cannot deal directly with the Department of Education and Skills on foot of a report from an educational psychologist. That would solve many of our problems. We would take out all of the people in the middle who were put in place to give jobs to the boys. When we talk about special needs assistants, we must be careful to quantify exactly what we are talking about and what is needed. Many children in school need a special needs assistant for four or five hours per week; they do not need one for 40 hours per week. However, as there are those who do need somebody for the full school term, we cannot make global statements. I certainly would welcome an open and frank debate in the Chamber on this issue.