Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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31. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the reason his Department wrote to the National Council for Special Education on 30 May regarding the 75% resource teaching allocations they were asked to delay communicating this information to schools for three weeks; if he will respond to criticism that this resulted in considerable uncertainty for school authorities who would have found it difficult to put in place staff for September at such short notice. [32210/13]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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My Department wrote to the NCSE on 30 May 2013 to confirm that the NCSE should allocate resource teaching hours at an allocation rate 10% below the allocation made for the 2012-13 school year. This was because the demand for low incidence resource teaching had again risen, to remain within the Employment Control Framework agreement and to ensure there would be sufficient resource teaching posts to make equivalent allocations for all qualifying children. While this letter did not request the NCSE to delay communicating this decision to schools, in a follow up discussion between my officials and the NCSE, my officials requested that the announcement of the Resource Teacher and Special Needs Assistant allocations would be made at the same time, as had happened the previous year. The NCSE initially published details of the allocations for SNAs and resource teaching hours for the 2013-14 school year on Wednesday, 19 June last. I have subsequently authorised the NCSE to restore the level of resource teaching allocations which can be provided for students with special educational needs to the 2012-13 levels. There will not now be any reduction to resource teaching time for children on the level which applied last year.