Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for being a voice in the Seanad during the years for children with special educational needs. I congratulate him on his Darkness into Light event which was held recently. The purpose was to highlight the issues encountered by people who had problems with their vision.

I am the Minister of State with responsibility for the higher education sector, but I am delighted to take this Commencement matter. The Government is committed to ensuring all children with special educational needs can have access to an education appropriate to their needs. Under the new resource teacher allocation model which was introduced in the current school year, the allocation of additional special education teachers is based on each school's educational profile. The profile captures the school's overall requirement for additional teaching supports without the need to individually identify each student with special educational needs. One important element of the school's educational profile is the number of students with complex needs enrolled.

In its 2014 report, Delivery for Students with Special Educational Needs, the National Council for Special Education advised that students with complex needs were those who required additional teaching support because they needed highly individualised and differentiated learning programmes significantly different from those of their peers. The new allocation model commenced in September 2017. Following consultation with education partners and stakeholders, the NCSE’s low incidence allocations which had been made for each school during the preceding 2016-17 school year were used to establish the complex needs component of the profile for each school. This meant that on the introduction of the new allocation model and until allocations were reviewed, no school received an allocation for the support of pupils with complex needs that was less than the allocation it had received to support pupils with low incidence special educational needs during the 2016-17 school year.

In using the low incidence data from the NCSE to ensure children with complex needs were captured in the profiles of all schools, I am satisfied that no school has been disadvantaged by the allocation process. The Department of Education and Skills' Circulars 0013/2017 and 0014/2017 set out details of how the complex needs category of the profile was developed based on the existing low incidence allocations. They indicate that for the next re-profiling of the model, the complex needs category will take account of the existing low incidence allocations for schools less any leaver included in this category, plus additional allocations for any new complex needs category pupil in the period from when the first school profiles were developed to the point of the next re-profiling of the model.

A working group of officials, including officials of the Department, the NCSE, the National Educational Psychological Service and the HSE, continues to work to develop the complex needs component of the model. The work of the group is at an advanced stage. The working group will take account of the decision-making process and qualification criteria for the selection of children for access to HSE children disability network teams and how this information can be transferred from the HSE to the NCSE to inform future allocations following reviews. The working group will conclude its work on the identification of complex needs in advance of the review of allocations to schools which must be concluded by the end of 2018 in order that the allocations can be notified to schools in January 2019.