Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein)
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457. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills to introduce special educational needs coordinators to support students with a disability in transitioning through all educational settings. [32657/25]

Michael Moynihan (Cork North-West, Fianna Fail)
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Each school is provided with Special Education Teacher (SET) hours to support children who have been identified with an additional learning need via the continuum of support framework. There are over 14,700 SETs supporting mainstream classes in the 2024/25 school year, which is an increase of over 1,000 since the end of the 2021 school year. This is the highest number of SET teachers ever in our schools. For 2025/2026 this will increase again looking at the needs of our mainstream schools.

It is expected the principal will allow time, from within this allocation for the special education teacher(s) for information gathering and assessment, reviewing, monitoring and co­ordinating provision for children with special educational needs. This would include transition planning for the identified students. Children with special educational needs require targeted support with transitions, tailored to their needs identified in Student Support Plans.

However, as we acknowledge the growing number of children with special educational needs transitioning to post primary over the coming years, there will also be additional resources provided to every post primary school in 2025 to assist them in the effective planning and support of these children. Post primary schools require significant time for special needs coordination, planning, tracking, consultation, communication, and reporting and this time is likely to increase as more children with special educational needs transition from primary to post primary settings.

These resources to post primary schools will be in the form additional hours to schools with a full year cost of €4 million and the Department will work with our education partners as to how this will be best implemented for the next school year. This additional investment demonstrates the Department’s commitment to supporting schools and we will continue to seek to increase this support in future years.

My Department is committed to supporting effective transitions through all educational settings and there are a number of actions ongoing to support this. The Department of Education is currently finalising actions for inclusion in the National Human Rights Strategy for Disabled persons in conjunction with other government departments. These will include specific actions aimed at addressing all of the key transition points for children and young people from early years education through to their transitions to post-school options.

In addition, the Department established a pilot transitions programme in 2022 as part of its response to the Comprehensive Employment Strategy (CES) for disabled people . This is a pilot programme to support the transition of young people with disabilities to improve access to, and opportunities for, post-school options. The pilot is subject to an external evaluation.