Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion from Sinn Féin. This is an important debate. The motion makes a valuable contribution to a debate that we should be having on a rolling basis. I welcome the Minister of State. I also welcome his commitment. I also acknowledge, as others did, the work of Senator Rabbitte in the Department previously.

All politics is local, according to the great Tip O'Neill, who was of Cork extraction. For that reason, I will begin by welcoming the new ASD units in Clifferna National School in Stradone, in Ballynary National School in Kilnaleck and St. Joseph's National School in Kingscourt. These are very good and welcome announcements that were made just last week. I am also very happy that we have two excellent autism units in my hometown of Bailieborough in both the primary and second level schools.

Initially, I want to look at has been achieved and then move on to talk about some of the challenges implicit in the motion. It is important to note that we have 124 special schools, 3,330 special classes and that budget 2025 provided for 300 additional special school places and 400 special classes. These new places will accommodate 2,700 students and five new special schools will open in the coming year. That is all encouraging. It is also important to note the huge State investment this year of €2.9 billion in supporting the provision of special education, a 48% increase on 2020. Those are the main headline figures but there is one other figure that is quite extraordinary. We now have 23,000 SNAs in our schools which marks a dramatic change from my youth and from my own time as a teacher. There was a recent announcement of €1.9 million by the Minister of State, who is being very proactive, and the Minister for Education, Deputy McEntee, for the Atlantic Technological University to provide in-service training to augment the skills of SNAs. That is a great figure because the SNAs are crucial and I know this from talking to my youngest son. I am very proud that he is a primary teacher and he tells me that the SNAs are so meaningful and that they make an enormous difference in the classroom. They go beyond the call of duty and beyond anything that might be reasonably expected of them.Those are some of the situations that we are in. I know the Government is increasing the number of SENOs but we need to speed up assessments. That is the one issue. If we can get the assessments speeded up, we should be better able to make projections as to special class needs based on those assessments and on experience in recent years. If we could achieve those objectives, it would be great. Time is short, but I want my colleague, Senator Nelson Murray, to have an input into this debate as well.