Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government's commitment to special education has been clear from the start of this pandemic. It is the first time that the public health advice was not taken on board. This has been a difficult time for families of children with special needs and we must ensure we try to get all of them back to school as soon as possible. It is positive that some of them will be back into a school environment on Thursday next but we want to ensure that this continues. There are approximately 18,500 children with special needs across the education sector so it is only approximately 4% of the entire education environment. As I said, we hope we will be in a position to do that over the next number of weeks. We are continuing our collaboration and intensive engagement with all our education partners, however, because, obviously, teachers and SNAs also have concerns. We are endeavouring to meet all those concerns. As Senator Bacik mentioned, the numbers are coming down as well. Hopefully, that will auger well for the future.