Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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Question 304: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the number of schools which have lost special needs assistants since March 2005; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [20140/05]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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SNAs are assigned to schools to meet the care needs of individual children who have been assessed by a psychologist as needing this type of support. There has been no change to the criteria or guidelines for allocating SNA support to schools and there are no plans to review the criteria or guidelines under which SNA support is allocated.

Applications for SNA support are now dealt with by the National Council for Special Education, which processes all applications for support from schools and communicates the decisions directly to the schools. At this stage, the council has dealt with all new applications from schools for SNAs that will be required from the beginning of September 2005.

To ensure that resources are used in the most effective manner, a review has been conducted in my Department in recent months to establish if primary schools have the level of SNA support that they need for children in their care, if they have resources which they no longer need or if they need extra resources.

The review has found that some schools no longer have the care needs for which the SNA was originally sanctioned, that is, in some cases the child may have left the school while in other cases the care needs of the child have diminished as the child has progressed through the school. In this regard, the schools where surplus SNA support was identified have been advised that they may retain this surplus until the end of the current school year. Accordingly, no schools that were identified as having surplus SNA support have yet lost that support.

My Department is engaged in discussions with the trade union representing SNAs, under the auspices of the Labour Relations Commission, on a number of issues relating to the employment of SNAs and these discussions are continuing. It would not be appropriate for me to comment specifically on any of the issues under discussion.

It has always been the case that where the care needs of a child no longer justify SNA support, that support should no longer have been available to the school.

This Government has put in place an unprecedented level of support for children with special needs. Since 1998, the number of SNAs has increased from under 300 to more than 6,300 nationally. In addition to this, more effective systems, such as the establishment of the National Council for Special Education, have been put in place to ensure that children get support as early as possible.