Paul Connaughton Snr (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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Question 41: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the number of children given psychological assessments by the National Education Psychological Service for each year since its inception; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [39561/05]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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All primary and post-primary schools have access to psychological assessments, either directly through the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, or through the scheme for commissioning psychological assessments, SCPA, full details of which are available on my Department's website.

In common with many other psychological services, NEPS operates a staged model of service to schools, whereby an initial referral usually leads to a consultation and provision of advice to teachers and parents on appropriate teaching and management strategies. Progress is kept under review and only those children who fail to respond to these interventions will need to see a psychologist. This allows the psychologists to offer early appointments to children who are in urgent need of support and early advice to teachers in respect to those children whose needs are perhaps less pressing but who still need additional help in school.

The following is the total number of assessments, by school year, carried out by NEPS psychologists for the years in question, not all of which involved full cognitive IQ assessments: 1999-2000, 3,051; 2000-01, 2,978; 2001-02, 4,536; 2002-03, 4,837; and 2003-04, 5,024. The figures for 2004-2005 are not yet available. In addition to those figures, it should be noted that the number of children assessed under the SCPA scheme since its inception in 2001 to the end of the calendar year 2004 was close on 12,000.

In 2004 NEPS was also involved in a verification process of over 5,000 children for additional resources prior to the appointment of special education needs organisers, SENOs, by the National Council for Special Education, NCSE, and prior to the new general allocation model put in place for schools in the context of additional teaching resources.