Dan Neville (Limerick West, Fine Gael)
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Question 148: To ask the Minister for Education and Science, further to Parliamentary Questions Nos. 175 of 12 October 2004 and 557 of 19 October 2004, the position regarding a person (details supplied) in County Limerick in connection with the provision of a special needs assistant. [20418/05]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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Special needs assistants 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 special needs assistant support to schools and there are no plans to review the criteria or guidelines under which special needs assistant support is allocated.

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

In order to ensure that resources are used in the most effective manner, a review has been conducted in recent months to establish whether primary schools have the level of special needs assistant support that they need for children in their care, whether they have resources which they no longer need or whether they need extra resources. The review has found that some schools no longer have the care needs for which the special needs assistant 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 special needs assistant support was identified have been advised that they may retain this surplus until the end of the current school year.

A review of special needs assistant support has recently been completed in the school in question. The outcome of the review determined that the pupil concerned should have shared access to a full-time special needs assistant. The level of support recommended was 20 hours per week. The school authorities were notified accordingly on 18 March 2005.

The Government has put in place an unprecedented level of support for children with special needs. Since 1998, the number of special needs assistants has increased from under 300 to over 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.