Niall Collins (Limerick County, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Minister of State, Deputy Josepha Madigan, I thank Senator Clonan for raising a very important issue. I stress that it is absolutely vital that every child and young person with special educational needs is fully supported in the education sector, whether this be in mainstream education or in a special class or special school. Significant investment and reforms have been made to ensure this is the case.

A priority for this Government is to ensure that all children have an appropriate school placement and necessary supports are provided for our schools to cater for children with special educational needs. This year, the Department of Education will spend in excess of €2.6 billion, or over 27% of the Department's budget, on providing additional teaching and care supports for children with special educational needs. For the first time ever, we have over 19,000 teachers working in the area of special education, and over 20,000 special needs assistants. Together, we have almost 40,000 qualified and committed people in our schools who are focused wholly and exclusively on supporting children with special educational needs.

The children will undoubtedly benefit, as is right and proper, from the additional focus these resources will bring to their education. Primary and post-primary schools make provision for pupils' special education needs through a continuum of interventions, ranging from additional teaching supports in mainstream schools to placement in a special class or, in some cases, enrolment in a special school. Schools are provided with the resources through the special education teacher allocation model to assist them in meeting the needs of their students, including those with language difficulties. Schools are required to target their additional resources at those students requiring the greatest levels of support. These supports ensure that the vast majority of our children with additional needs are supported to attend mainstream classes with their peers.

Specialist provision for children with specific speech and language disorder, SSLD, is available at primary level. This is based on the principle of early intervention. These classes are designed to provide a time-limited, targeted intervention for children with severe impairments in their skills of understanding and expressing themselves through spoken language. Pupils who attend special classes for children with SSLD return to mainstream provision following the two-year intervention and they can avail of further supports from schools' special education teachers. These classes are set up in agreement with HSE speech and language services and students attending these classes receive speech and language therapy in school. As such, the specialist intervention is not intended to support all children with less complex speech and language needs as these needs should be met through or other school or community-based language interventions.The intensive support provided by speech and language therapists, working in collaboration with teachers in SSLD classes over a two-year period aims to equip children with the necessary speech and language skills to transition back to their mainstream class, with their peers. SSLD classes are at the higher end of the scale of interventions to support children and are in line with practice in many other countries. The level of provision in SSLD classes over this two-year period has been found to be of a high standard in various Department of Education inspectorate evaluations. The Department of Education has also introduced the school inclusion model to enhance the capacity of all teachers to meet the language needs of pupils. This model is running on a pilot basis, and lessons learned will inform plans to scale up provision in this area.