Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. We welcome and support any measures to increase the number of special educational or additional needs education places and supports. However, I see this legislation as a very small measure in the overall need to ensure we provide for children with additional or special needs. Once children are diagnosed, they are entitled to a certain number of services. However, time and again I come up against the basic issue of getting a diagnosis. In the Cabra-Grangegorman children's disability network team, CDNT, there is a wait of more than three years to get a diagnosis and all the while children and their families are left in limbo because they do not have that diagnosis. I hope the Minister of State looked very closely at the recommendations from the Ombudsman for Children on creating alternative pathways to additional needs and special needs support in schools. It is simply appalling that some of us need to recommend to families to go away and spend between €1,000 and €3,000 to get a private diagnosis in order to get their constitutional right to an education.

I am slightly uncomfortable about the narrative around the Bill which is about directing schools to make provision. For me the elephant in the room is that there are many DEIS band 1 schools going over and beyond to ensure provision for the children attending their schools while other schools are shunning their responsibilities. Because of that precise situation, I need to raise with the Minister of State comments she made when she singled out four schools in recent weeks. She said the schools have not been forthcoming in opening special classes in specific circumstances where they know they have capacity. She said the decision to name schools was because they were not engaging at all and they were just ignoring correspondence.

As a lawyer and as a Minister of State, she knows that words can do enormous damage. Her words have caused enormous distress to the teaching staff and to the families who attend St. Gabriel's in Stoneybatter. It was never the case that that school was not engaging or was ignoring correspondence. In fact, the school has been engaging with an architect engaged by the Department since last autumn, to discuss the refurbishment of two school rooms so that they could open an ASD unit in 2023.It has eight class teachers and six resource teachers. It could not be further from the truth, therefore, to suggest this school is not committed to special needs. In fact, so much of what it does is about providing for children with additional needs. It is telling that the Department sent an email at 7.30 p.m. on a Friday, 17 June, to the Archbishop of Dublin, the patron of the school. The Department did not even have the grace to email the school directly to inform it that it was going to publish its name unless it communicated. The school responded within hours, yet that did not matter because the Minister of State, unfortunately, proceeded to name the school. Those teachers are now looking back on a decade of progress and asking what the Department and the community think about its work. Will the Minister of State please engage directly with the school and issue a public apology, given it is not true that it was not engaging and in light of the considerable hurt in the community?

In the context of what I would call a whole-of-education approach, I understand this Bill is very much directed towards ensuring there will be adequate provision within primary schools. As I said, we support that, but we also need to look at the continuum into secondary schools and also within preschools. Anybody who understands special needs knows it is about early intervention. The decisions made in respect of St. Gabriel's in Stoneybatter have meant that a preschool within that school has had to close. Two children with additional needs, who were getting great support within that preschool, will now have nothing for this September. At the age of four, they will have no special needs intervention in a preschool setting but they will have fabulous facilities once they begin primary school in the following September. What about the 12 months in between? Weeks and months matter in children's lives at that age. What are the Minister of State and the Department doing to ensure children across the board are being looked after? Unless we get those early interventions right, we will store up all sorts of problems, as we are seeing, within both the primary and secondary school system.