‘No account taken of the impact reduced support will have on pupils’

PRINCIPAL Anna Mai Rooney and her staff face a logistical nightmare trying to spread reduced supports among four pupils with special care needs from next month.

St Louis Girls School in Monaghan town is one of just over 1,000 primary schools where the role of special needs assistants (SNAs) has been reviewed since last April.

The four girls, who get help from three SNAs, two full-time and one on a 20-hour week, all have physical care needs and two have additional special needs which have merited support for many years. But the review means the school’s SNA resources sanctioned by the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) will drop by 14 hours a week from February 1, even though SNA provision in around two-thirds of the country’s 4,000 schools has yet to be assessed.

“One of these girls has a full-time SNA and she is in sixth class, I’m really annoyed that the help could not be kept until June. From her parents’ perspective, it seems ridiculous to go from 32 hours of support a week to 15 at this stage,” said Ms Rooney.

This echoes a call by the IMPACT union, representing almost half the country’s 10,500 SNAs, for Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe to extend the exemption on SNA job losses to the summer holidays.

The Department of Education last year asked the NCSE to ensure all SNA posts meet relevant criteria and that SNA resources are being withdrawn if pupils leave a school or have reduced needs. Based on preliminary outcomes revealed by the Irish Examiner last July, around 1,200 SNAs could be made redundant when the review is finished.

The February 1 deadline was set when the NCSE review was expected to finish late last year, but the Department of Education has said it will not be extended despite delayed completion of the review.

Ms Rooney, who is an executive member of the Irish Primary Principals Network, said no account is taken of the impact reduced support will have on pupils.

“Some have to go in and out of classes for resource teaching and learning support, but there are also many activities in the classroom where a child with an SNA could not participate otherwise, such as art, drama, physical education and most other subjects at different times,” she said.

While acknowledging that many schools will lose a higher proportion of their SNA support, she said her school will suffer a big impact by losing 14 of its 84 hours of weekly provision.

“It effects time-tabling the movements of all 20 classes and 267 pupils because some girls need help getting around the corridors,” Ms Rooney said.

“The department was generous with funding for SNAs over the last four or five years but that hasn’t been happening for some time. Now they’re cutting back and it’s purely down to economics,” she said.