Peter Fitzpatrick (Louth, Fine Gael)
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166. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if it is a constitutional right for a child to receive additional care and special support in a school with six children with learning difficulties. [30884/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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Under the Constitution, the State provides for education and where the public good requires it, to provide other educational facilities or institutions rather than to provide education directly. The Education Act 1998, subject to the provisions of that Act, provides that there is made available to each person resident in the State a level and quality of education which is appropriate to meeting the needs and abilities of that person.

My Department's policy is that children with special educational needs should be included in mainstream placements with additional supports provided, unless such a placement would not be in their best interests or in the interests of the children with whom they are to be educated, as is provided for under Section 2 of the Education of Persons with Special Needs Act 2004.

Students with special educational needs have access to a range of support services including additional teaching and/or care supports. Some children may be supported in mainstream with additional supports or in a special class attached to a mainstream school. Students in a special class have the option, where appropriate, of full/partial integration and interaction with other pupils. Other children may have such complex needs that they are best placed in a special school. In special schools and special classes, students are supported through lower pupil teacher ratios. My Department, therefore, provides for a range of placement options and supports for schools, which have enrolled pupils with special educational needs, in order to ensure that wherever a child is enrolled, s/he will have access to an appropriate education.  

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 as required. The NCSE operates within the Department's criteria in allocating such support, as set out in various Departmental circulars.

Special Needs Assistants (SNAs) are provided to assist recognised schools to cater for pupils with disabilities, who have additional and significant care needs, in an educational context and where the nature of these care needs have been outlined in medical and other professional reports as being so significant that a pupil will require additional adult assistance in order to be able to attend school and to participate in education.

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 care needs can access SNA support as and when it is needed. My Department’s policy is to ensure that every child who is assessed as needing SNA support will receive access to such support.

SNAs are not allocated to individual children but to schools, as a school based resource. The NCSE allocates a quantum of SNA support for each school annually, taking into account the care needs of all of the qualifying children enrolled in the school, and on the basis of the assessed care needs of all of the children concerned, rather than solely by reference to a pupil’s disability categorisation.

The provision of a quantum of support to schools gives schools the autonomy and flexibility to manage their allocation of SNA support in order to utilise this support to the best possible effect. It allows schools to target support to those pupils who have the greatest degree of need at any given time, recognising that the level of need that a child may have may be variable over time. The school is in a position to use their educational experience and expertise to manage the level of support which has been allocated to them to provide for the care needs of identified children as and when those needs arise and to provide access to SNA support for all children who have been granted assess to support.

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

All schools have the contact details of their local SENO and parents may also contact their local SENO directly to discuss their child's special educational needs, using the contact details available on www.ncse.ie.

From September 2017, a new Special Education Teaching allocation process will be introduced, replacing the generalised allocation process 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, to support pupils assessed as having Low Incidence disabilities.

The aim of this new model is to deliver better outcomes for children with special educational needs. Substantial research, analysis, consultation with service users and stakeholders, and piloting have gone in to the development of this model and all of the evidence points to the fact that this new system will deliver better outcomes for children.

No school will lose supports as a result of the implementation of the new model. In addition, no school will receive an allocation, for the support of pupils with complex needs, less than the allocation they received to support such pupils during the 2016/17 school year.

DES Circular 0013/2017 for primary schools and 0014/2017 for post primary schools were published and allocations based on the school profiles were issued to all schools on 7th March 2017. Details of the special education teaching allocations have also been published on the NCSE website.

Guidelines for schools on the organisation, deployment and use of their special education teachers to address the need of pupils with special educational needs have also now been published and are available on my Department’s website.

The Guidelines will support schools to reflect on how they can review and manage their timetabling practices to ensure the timetable is sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of all pupils in their school who have special educational needs. The Guidelines encourage schools to ensure they deploy their resources appropriately to meet the needs of all of the children in their school who require additional teaching support, including pupils with emerging needs, or new entrants.

The total profiled allocation which is being made to each school is designed to ensure that all schools have a set level of special education teaching support in order to provide additional teaching support for all pupils in their school, including those who may enrol in future, who have identified needs.

Pupils under the new allocation model will be identified by schools for additional teaching support in accordance with the Continuum of Support Guidelines, and the Guidelines which accompany the Circulars 0013/2017 and 0014/2017. Teachers and School Principals will use their professional judgement in applying the principles and practices set out in the Continuum of Support Guidelines: .

In circumstances where a parent is dissatisfied as to the extent of additional support teaching time which has been allocated to their child from within a schools allocation, the normal course of action open to a parent would be to raise this matter with the school Principal in the first instance, and to request that additional teaching be provided to their child.

In the event that a parent raised an issue in relation to the allocation of additional support for their child with the school Principal, and remains dissatisfied with the manner in which the school Principal addressed their complaint, the next course of action open to the parent would be to raise this matter directly with the Board of Management of the School, who are the body which has responsibility for the management of the school.