Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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The Deputy will be aware that the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) is responsible, through its network of local Special Educational Needs Organisers (SENOs) for allocating resource teachers and Special Needs Assistants (SNAs) to schools to support children with special educational needs. The NCSE operates within my Department's criteria in allocating such support. This now includes a requirement for the NCSE to have regard to an overall cap on the number of SNA posts.

The NCSE has advised all mainstream schools of their SNA allocations for the 2011/12 school year and has recently published statistical information in relation to the allocation of SNA posts and resource teaching hours to Primary Special and Post Primary Schools. The information is provided on a county by county and school by school basis on its website at www.ncse.ie.

The information requested by the Deputy in relation to the number of SNAs allocated to schools in County Carlow for the current school year is therefore available on the NCSE website. However, as this is the first year that the NCSE has published statistical information in this format, the information requested by the Deputy in relation to the number of SNAs employed by schools in County Carlow for last year is not readily available.