‘No child will lose learning supports’
Problems have arisen in up to one-third of the country’s 3,300 schools, particularly in rural areas, where a new model of allocating staff has led to fears of children with learning difficulties losing resource teaching hours.
Ms Hanafin said she would review the model, introduced last summer by her predecessor Noel Dempsey, to ensure no child lost any teaching hours. The scheme sets out ratios of special needs staff for every school from next September, based on likely numbers of pupils with common learning difficulties.
However, the system would have led to the loss of resources in smaller schools, which have above-average supports due to higher incidences of special needs. Some schools reported that their resource teaching staff were to be cut by up to two-thirds under the new scheme.
“I will be reviewing this model to ensure that it provides an automatic response for students with mild learning disabilities or difficulties without the need for cumbersome individual applications, while making sure that no child loses a support that they currently have,” she said.
Ms Hanafin also announced that she has sanctioned an extra 295 Special Needs Assistants (SNAs) for children who need help in the classroom due to disability or learning difficulties. The posts will be filled at 497 schools, which had no SNA provisions up to now.
The minister acknowledged that the speed of response to special needs applications has been too slow in the past and said she was determined to ensure fast provision for children who needed support.
Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) general secretary John Carr urged that the review begin immediately and be concluded quickly. “The chaos of last year cannot be repeated where schools, as late as the last week in August, did not know what was happening. Minister Hanafin will have set many minds at rest, but we have calculated that to do this will mean an additional 650 teachers,” he said.
National Parents Council (Primary) chief executive Fionnuala Kilfeather expressed concern that children who attend special schools should not be forgotten in the plan. She also called on the Minister to put measures in place to deal with the small number of teachers who were not providing an adequate service for pupils.
