Carol Nolan (Offaly, Sinn Fein)
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203. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the estimated cost of increasing the low incidence proportion of the special needs allocation to schools under the new resource allocation model by 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% respectively; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [17774/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I wish to advise the Deputy that DES Circular 0013/2017 for primary schools and 0014/2017 for post primary schools were published on 7th March 2017.

These Circulars set out the details of the new model for allocating special education teachers to schools.

The revised allocation process replaces the generalised allocation processes at primary and post primary school level for learning support and high incidence special educational needs, and the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) allocation process, which provided additional resource teaching supports to schools in order to support pupils assessed as having Low Incidence disabilities.

The new Special Education Teaching allocation provides a single unified allocation for special educational support teaching needs to each school, based on the allocation of a Baseline component provided to every mainstream school and, a school’s educational profile, based on the number of students with complex special educational needs in the school, the percentage of students performing below a certain threshold on standardised test results and the social context of a school.

Whereas the low incidence resource teaching allocations for the 2016/17 school year were used as the basis to create the complex needs component of the new allocation model, this will change over time, as pupils from this category leave and are replaced by pupils who fulfil the complex needs criteria for the new allocation model, as set out in DES Circulars 0013 and 0014. The complex needs component of the profile will form one part of the profiled allocation with the extent of allocations being made to any component of the model being relative to each other and the number of qualifying pupils in each category.

There are currently approximately 7000 posts allocated to schools in the Low Incidence/Complex needs component of the school profile, at a current cost of approximately €420M.

Assuming no other changes were made to this base allocation level, or cost, the estimated cost of increasing the low incidence/complex needs proportion of the special needs allocation to schools under the new resource allocation model by 5%, would be €21M per year, by 10% would be €42M per year, by 15% would be €63M per year, and by 20% would be €84M per year.

An additional 900 teaching posts have been provided to support the introduction of this new allocation model. The provision of an additional 900 teaching posts is a very significant investment in the provision of additional teaching support for pupils with special educational needs in our schools. This is additional to an increase of 41% in the number of resource teachers allocated to schools annually by the NCSE since 2011.