Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit chuig an Seanad. It is timely that he is taking this Commencement matter on World Autism Awareness Day and I thank him for coming into the House.

This morning, I joined a group of approximately 40 parents and grandparents in Crumlin, Dublin 12. We have been campaigning for quite a long time for extensions to the services provided for their children. Many of them do not have any services for their children and are relying on home tuition, which is not ideal. If they were lucky, some of them were offered places located miles away in the expectation that a five year old child would take a bus to Maynooth and back again. That is just not feasible. We need to act urgently in this regard.

In terms of this Commencement matter, schools are under a statutory obligation to provide education appropriate to students' needs and ensure the educational needs of all students, including those with a disability, are identified and provided for. That is a statutory obligation on our Government and on the Minister. We know also that there are guidelines for primary and post-primary schools. However, the challenge remains in terms of resourcing and equipping our teachers to deliver on the many expectations placed on them.

One primary teacher I spoke to recently is passionate and dedicated to her role but in her four years of teacher training she was given the bare minimum to deal with pupils with additional needs. The story is replicated when we look at the situation around individual education plans, IEPs, for teenagers with Down's syndrome. The teachers unions - the ASTI and the TUI - advised members recently to stop providing these critical planning processes for children with additional educational needs due to resource issues. IEPs are vital to ensure a positive learning environment for students with Down's syndrome but teachers and, more importantly, the young people themselves are caught in the middle between expectations without adequate support.

It is essential and a no-brainer that our children should have a dynamic, adaptable and inclusive schooling environment that is mindful of their needs. What exactly is the current training offered to teachers? How do we know it is sufficient to meet the needs of our children? How is it evaluated or monitored?

Several teachers spoke bravely and in depth about the pressures they feel in managing their large class sizes with so many individual needs. How do we intend to ensure that teachers' mental health and well-being is monitored within this context of improving responses to additional needs and mainstream education?

The Minister of State knows that there are autism spectrum disorder, ASD, units but they are not adequate. They are excellent when they operate well but our objective would be to move children on to mainstream schooling and have them included and not excluded. The loud, clear and proud chant from the parents this morning was education, not discrimination. It is the education system we need to focus on, one that will equip, enable and support teachers to provide for the individual needs of their pupils in their large classes. That includes those with autism.