TWENTY-THREE children with special needs were welcomed into their new school in Dublin this week and then told an hour later that there was no place for them.

EDUCATION Minister Batt O’Keeffe’s plans to cut hundreds of special needs assistant places could force a vital special needs school to axe a series of courses on the curriculum, its principal has claimed.

A SCHOOL principal fighting to give severely disabled students a summer camp appealed to Education Minister Noel Dempsey directly yesterday to give him €5,000 for the project.