Quinn spins into a U-turn he knew of a month ago

A look behind the shroud and spin in Ruairi Quinn’s statements, those of the NCSE, and of Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s pontificating in the Dáil last week on the special needs education cuts casts some light on what happens inside the Department of Education.

It was the 12% surge in applications that Quinn on Tuesday said had prompted the fast-tracking of a review into resource teaching allocations — a review already announced would happen and recommended to him over a month ago — which he used to front his U-turn. He had just got Cabinet approval to reverse the planned cut in weekly resource teaching hours for 4,000 additional children with disabilities — the cut that he and Gilmore assured us not a week earlier was merely an adjustment.

The numbers now qualifying for resource teaching have reached 42,500 in mainstream primary and second-level schools. This rise, combined with the ongoing cap of 5,265 resource teachers the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) can assign to schools, prompted last week’s bad news to schools and children.

Pupils were to be given just 75% of the time with a resource teacher set out in 2005 department policy. That will now go back to 85%, the same reduced level in place since last year.

The Irish Examiner revealed last Friday how Quinn’s officials told the NCSE on May 30 to delay telling schools about the 75% allocation. The department had decided, based on evidence of demand, that schools were not to be told their reduced teacher allocations until they were given their SNA numbers, which did not happen until Jun 19.

When asked why it asked that the 75% figure be kept confidential, the department said the NCSE was still working on SNA applications at the end of May. It made sense, it said, that SNA and resource teacher number be notified to schools simultaneously.

This, the Irish Examiner was told, was because there were fewer SNAs in schools at the end of the year than the upper limit of 10,575 it can sanction.

On the basis that if at the end of the NCSE’s work assigning SNAs “there were surplus SNA posts, the [Department of Education] would have considered possibly transferring some of those posts into resource teaching to make up the shortfall there”.

“This was a possibility: The NCSE actually had 88 surplus SNA posts in the current school year,” the department said.

Plausible explanation, maybe, but figures given by Quinn to the Dáil education committee almost a fortnight ago appear to suggest otherwise. On Jun 13, he was able to give an indication of how many SNAs were to be allocated, because his officials had figures with them.

The number was 10,410, he said. That was more than 80 short of the number eventually sanctioned by the NCSE six days later, on Wednesday of last week. Crucially it was already 99 more than the 10,311 SNAs the NCSE sanctioned this time last year.

So how likely was it that there would have been sufficient “spare capacity” of SNAs to sanction more resource teachers, given that around 180 were allocated to schools during the past school year, in the months that followed the Jun 2012 allocation?

Quinn admitted to the Irish Examiner, when interviewed last Friday, that it was unlikely. Even if it were, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation and the Joint Managerial Body (JMB) which represents 370 secondary schools, have said principals would prefer to have known about a reduced allocation three weeks earlier to begin planning timetables.

Taking these facts, and that Quinn’s department had preliminary indications of demand for resource teachers since mid-April, questions remain for the minister and his team the next time they are before the Oireachtas education committee.

How much did the minister know about the rise in resource teaching applications? If he didn’t know, had he not asked? If it was of a scale he described this week as “a surge”, why was it not brought to his attention? Quinn and his most senior civil servants were, after all, publicly urged as recently as the JMB conference on May 2 of the huge importance to schools of early notification of resource teaching posts for next year.

All these questions may be asked by the committee, chaired and deputy chaired by Joanna Tuffy and Aodhán Ó Riordáin, TDs from Labour backbenches to whose compassionate ears Quinn attributed this week’s U-turn.

It’s been a week of “who knew what, when”. These are a few more that TDs and senators can ask on behalf of children, parents, and schools, with no need for changes to legislation or the Constitution.