Forced to look at pupils’ needs on ‘case-by-case basis’

For primary school principal Michael Daly, news of more cuts to special needs provision appears to impact like an axe taken to the household budget.

The 115 resource teaching hours his school should have will instead be almost 30 hours less from next September.

These 86 hours will have to be divided among pupils with a range of disabilities at Glasheen Boys’ National School in Cork City.

“Some of our applications were in since last October or November, for boys with new diagnoses, and we’ve had to juggle what we already had since then.

“We’ll have to look at things on a case-by-case basis and cater for the most severe needs. The time lost also impacts on the ability of our special needs team to liaise with class teachers and work out education plans for each of them,” he said.

But there will be a knock-on effect across the 320-pupil school as staff try to manage with less special needs support.

“We now have a cake that has to be divided among more people and decide who gets what and what’s going to have to be cut.

“It means paring back programmes like Literacy Lift-off and Reading Recovery that are all part of the Government initiative to increase literacy and numeracy, and all the extra effort gone into the new Aistear programme for infant classes.”

These are the effects of the restriction on resource teaching allocations to just 75% of the time recommended in the Department of Education policy set in 2005. The 4,773 resource teaching posts allocated to schools by the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) for September are 90% of the number allowed under a troika-impost cap.

But the remaining 500 are likely to be used up by autumn before the cap being maintained by Education Minister Ruairi Quinn is reached.

The NCSE notified schools yesterday how the posts are being divided, with 13% fewer hours allocated to primary schools and 5% less to secondary schools than they had at the end of this school year.

NCSE chief executive Teresa Griffin rejected teacher union claims that their announcement was a spin that tried to hide the cuts by emphasising that overall resource teacher and special needs assistant numbers are unchanged.

“We have been very up front. We have made no effort to put a spin on it, but we wanted to reassure parents and schools that the overall numbers as been maintained,” she said.

“I would encourage schools to continue to maximise their use of additional teaching hours through careful planning, team teaching and or withdrawal of students to work in small groups in order to minimise the impact of this adjustment on individual students.”

But the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) said it is disingenuous to claim no cuts have been made to overall special needs staffing when the demand for such supports has risen by 10%.

“The reductions will mean a student who two years ago would have been allocated five resource teacher hours will now just get three hours and 45 minutes. The consequences will be dramatic not just for the student with special educational needs but for every other student in his or her classroom,” ASTI president Gerry Breslin said.