Josepha Madigan (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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All schools have an allocation of special education teaching (SET) support for pupils with special educational needs. The Special Education Teaching allocation model provides a single unified allocation for special educational support teaching needs to each school, based on a school’s educational profile.

This allocation allows schools to provide additional teaching support for all pupils who require such support in their schools and for schools to deploy resources based on each pupil’s individual learning needs.

This gives greater flexibility to schools as to how they can deploy their resources, to take account of the actual learning needs pupils have, as opposed to being guided by a particular diagnosis of disability, and schools are guided as to how they should make such allocation decisions.

The provision of a profiled allocation is designed to give a fair allocation for each school which recognises that all schools need an allocation for special needs support, but which provides a graduated allocation which takes into account the level of need in each school.

The allocation of special education teachers to mainstream schools is based on a school’s educational profile, which comprises two components:

• Baseline component provided to every mainstream school to support inclusion, assistance with learning difficulties and early intervention, and
• A school educational profile component, which takes into account:

- The number of pupils with complex needs enrolled to the school.

-The learning needs of pupils as evidenced by standardised test results for literacy and numeracy.

-The social context of the school including disadvantage and gender.

Data is provided by the HSE Children Disability Network teams on the number of new entrants with complex needs to primary schools and this data has been incorporated into the model. A value is applied for each student counted in the complex need category in your school.

The HSE’s procedures for determining access to Children Disability Network Teams are outlined in the National Policy on Access to Services for Children and Young People with Disability and Developmental Delay (HSE 2016). Access is based on the child’s functioning capacity across a range of domains, as opposed to being based on formal a diagnosis of disability.

Both the Department and the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) are committed to ensuring that all schools are treated equally and fairly in the manner in which their school profiles have been calculated.

A review of the SET model has taken place in relation to the SET allocations for the 2024/25 school year and the circulars advising schools of how these allocations were calculated was published on 6 February 2024.