Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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292. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the status of an application by a person (details supplied) for special assistance during school hours. [9791/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The National Council for Special Education (NCSE), which is an independent statutory agency, is responsible, through its network of Special Educational Needs Organisers (SENOs), for processing applications from schools for special educational needs supports, including SNA support and additional teaching resources to support individual pupils with special educational needs.

The NCSE allocates SNA support to schools in accordance with the criteria set out in my Department's Circular 0030/2014, which is available on my Department's website at www.education.ie, in order that students who have special educational needs and additional care needs can access SNA support as and when it is needed.

Responsibility for deciding on the quantum of educational supports and resources to be allocated to schools to support individual pupils rests with the NCSE.

SNA allocations are not made to individual children, but are made to schools to support the care needs of children with assessed special educational needs in the school.

Additional teaching resources are allocated to recognised primary and post-primary schools for the support of individual students with complex and enduring special educational needs and who have been assessed as having a low incidence disability.

Each year the NCSE allocates Low Incidence Resource Teacher posts to schools to support children with a diagnosis of a disability and an assessed level of need, as set out in Circular Sp Ed 02/05.

Where a school wishes to appeal the resource teaching support and/or SNA allocations which has been made to them, they may do so through the NCSE appeal process, details of which are set out at www.ncse.ie.

Last month, I announced that a new model for allocating Special Education Teaching Resources to mainstream primary and post primary schools will be introduced from September 2017. The new model will allocate teachers to schools on the basis of the profiled educational needs of each school. This new model will encompass the Learning/Language support allocation that schools were allocated in previous years.

As the matter raised by the Deputy refers to a particular child, I have arranged for the Deputy's question to be forwarded to the National Council for Special Education for their attention and direct reply.