Joe Conway (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas le Sinn Féin as ucht an rún tábhachtach seo a chur os comhair an Tí seo. Déanaim comhghairdeas leis an Aire Stáit. Tá súil agam go rachaidh sé i ngleic leis an gceist chasta seo as seo amach.

I support an inclusive approach to education and recognise the constitutional right of all children to an education, tailored to their individual needs, as articulated in our Education Act 1998, which states it should be "made available to each person resident in the State, including a person with a disability or who has other special educational needs, support services and a level and quality of education appropriate to meeting the needs and abilities of that person".

That is a legislative imperative. Over the years, developments in that legislation and case law have shaped the landscape, including key documents such as the Disability Act 2005, Education (Admission to Schools) Act 2018, Education (Provision in Respect of Children with Special Needs) Act 2022, United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Irish Sign Language Act 2017. Those significant legislative advances left significant gaps, always in the pursuit of essential support services, particularly in schools that are augmented by the HSE. Schools have become increasingly the de facto providers of well-being and support for children outside of the family.

I want to take a small issue with Senator O’Flaherty, who is no longer present, when he said he considered trade unions to be obstructive in the work done in special education needs and provision. That is not my experience. I probably hold the record in this House as the person with the longest experience of school attendance. It started on 1 July 1957 and only finished last December, before I was elected to the House. That is 67 years of watching the progress of school, and by gum, have I seen some changes in that time. During the last 20 years of that career, I was given the great privilege and opportunity to go into schools when I was working with a teacher training college. Every day of the week I was looking at student teachers and assessing them on their teacher placements. I had a great opportunity to see the work being done by the teachers in the classroom with children with special needs at first-hand. Of all the deficits that we have in the special education provision in this country, they have been extraordinarily decreased by the primary school teachers through the work that they do using the universal design for learning, UDL, what we call differentiation, for the different levels in the classroom. When I talk to them, what they say most frequently is that while they spend a lot of time with certain children in the class with special needs, they worry about the other, say, 21 children who have no special needs but they are all individuals with various special needs of their own, although they are not designated as that. That is something that we have to remember in the great balance and the great panoply of things in education. If 5% of the schoolgoing population has obvious and designated special needs, 95% do not. The challenge for teachers, the system, the Minister of State and the Government when budgeting is to not lose sight of the ordinary children in the classroom because they have very definite needs as well. When I went into a school in Tallaght in 1973 as a young teacher, the buzzword in education when referring to deficit was "asthma". What people were worried about was inhalers and asthma. In the eighties, the buzzword was "dyslexia". Later, the fashion was dyspraxia and dyscalculia. There was an episode with relationships and sexuality. That took up approximately two years of the educational agenda. Since then, we have become very much taken up with the Asperger syndrome and the autism spectrum. That is really crucifying budgets and placing demands on the system. The trade unions and the 50,000 teachers they represent have not been obstructive in the debate and in the provision of special education; they have been quite the contrary. All of these issues will be solved. We learn that. All of the issues that beset the educational system will be solved but it will take a lot of money, a lot of patience, a lot of insight and a lot of thinking outside the box. I could talk for hours on this.