Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
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153. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if she will ensure that all children who meet the criteria for a special needs class will get a place in a special needs class in September 2025; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [38426/25]

Michael Moynihan (Cork North-West, Fianna Fail)
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The National Council for Special Education (NCSE) is the national agency with responsibility for the provision of special education places. This year the NCSE has sanctioned 407 new special classes for the coming school year bringing to 3,742 the number of special classes in our schools.

There are new classes in every county in Ireland and with the number of special classes doubling in the last five years, this now means that there are more classes than ever ensuring greater numbers of children can access places in their local school. Furthermore the number of special class places in our schools will exceed demand.

Combined with 300 new special school places this brings to 2,700 the number of new school places for children with special educational needs.

The NCSE has advised that just under 3,300 valid notifications were received by mid-February via their new parent notify service. Some of these notifications were children already known to the NCSE however, many others were new. Also, while parents were asked to notify the NCSE by mid-February the NCSE received a number of further notifications after this date.

Earlier this week I updated my Cabinet colleagues and subsequently the Oireachtas Committee on Education that the NCSE has advised me that the vast majority of children seeking a special school or special class place have now been assigned a school place. The NCSE are working very closely with the remaining families to ensure that they are being kept updated as the remaining special class and special school places are being finalised by a small number of schools.

I want to reassure the Deputy that my department and the NCSE are committed to ensuring that sufficient special education placements will be available for children for this school year and future years.

Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein)
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154. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the measures she is taking to amend this criterion following the dissemination of circular 0024/2025 (details supplied) to be inclusive of children with a disability and speech sound disorder; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [39679/25]

Michael Moynihan (Cork North-West, Fianna Fail)
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The Department of Education and Youth continues to support the needs of children and young people in the school system through the provision of additional resources to schools to the point where there are approximately 40,000 teachers and SNAs working to meet the educational and care needs of children and young people in schools. It is also important to note that the provision of speech and language therapy services to individual children and young people is the responsibility of the Health Service Executive.

There are, however, sixty-three special classes for pupils with significant speech issues attached to mainstream primary schools in dispersed geographical locations. These classes, which were categorised as Specific Speech and Language Disorder (SSLD) special classes cater for pupils with a very specific set of language needs for a maximum of two years. The enrolment criteria for these classes originate from the recommendations of the Special Education Review Committee Report (SERC) (1993). As envisaged by SERC, the classes were designed to provide a time-limited, targeted intervention for children with severe impairments in their skills of understanding and expressing themselves through spoken language.

The Inspectorate division of the Department published a composite report on the quality of provision for children attending these classes in 2021. While, overall, the Inspectorate reported positively on this provision, significant issues were noted. These included:

• Enrolment criteria for entry to the special SSLD classes do not align neatly with the current diagnostic definition (developmental language disorder DLD) which has been used by speech and language therapists in Ireland and internationally since 2017.
• Some schools indicated that there were difficulties caused by the divergence between the DLD diagnostic criteria and the narrower SSLD definitions, as well as the requirement for psychological assessments to establish children’s intellectual ability.