Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I attended a meeting last week at a primary school in my constituency. Another meeting that is coming up soon will combine a number of primary and secondary schools. A number of issues were raised at the meeting last week and will be raised at the meeting next week. The first and main issue is the lack of suitable and appropriate school places for children with additional educational needs. That is especially the case for autistic children but applies to all children with additional educational needs. One parent at the meeting said that her son is in sixth class. He is autistic. She has been applying to schools and looking for a suitable secondary school placement for her son but has not as yet been informed whether a place will be available.

All of us with children take it for granted that when we apply to schools to allow our children to progress from primary to secondary school there will be sufficient places to accommodate need in the locality. Unfortunately, for children with additional needs that is not the case. More often than not when we come to September, there are many students without places for the start of the school year. There were approximately 120 students without a place this year. That number has reduced in recent months but there are still students who do not have a secondary school place at the moment and are being educated at home. That is not fair.

It comes down to a severe lack of planning. There needs to be much better co-operation and consultation between the NCSE and the Department of Education to ensure this does not happen in the future. One of the teachers at the meeting was a special education teacher. She was put into the position of teaching in an autistic class when she had absolutely no training in special education. Most teachers do not have that training because it is not included in their primary degree. All of the teachers who are asked to teach a special class do their utmost to upskill. The teacher I am speaking about upskilled in her own time and at her own expense to ensure she knew what she was doing. That is not fair. We need continuous professional development for all teaching staff. We also need specified degrees in special education to be rolled out in this country to ensure that our staff are trained to educate children who have additional needs. That is a wide and varied cohort and every child has different needs.

One thing that teacher pointed out was that prior to the setting up of the children's disability network teams, CDNTs, members of the children's development teams used to call to the school. They were occupational therapists, OTs, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists. They would advise her and the special needs assistants, SNAs, in the school on practices they could and should use with the children. They would devise plans around the child's specific needs. That has not happened since the establishment of the CDNTs. What makes it worse is that the community supports that did exist for children prior to 2021 no longer exist in any shape or form. All of the parents at that meeting were able to say that their children had not seen an OT, a speech and language therapist or a physiotherapist since 2019, when the child's development teams were disbanded, along with the early intervention teams, in favour of the CDNTs. That structure is not working and needs to be replaced. I have for some time been advocating through committees and in the Dáil for in-school therapy for children.They should be in special schools but they should also be in mainstream schools where there are special classes attached. There could be a cluster of schools which would access support from a number of professionals who would go into the school, meet the children, devise plans to help them with their needs and instruct both the teachers and the SNAs how best to help educate those children. The teacher pointed out that many of the children in their autistic class in the school are either pre-verbal or non-verbal. The biggest problem is the frustration that they cannot communicate what their needs are to the teachers, and that causes all sorts of problems, including self-harm and harming of other students and of staff. It needs to be addressed.