Minister attacked SNA cuts in opposition

A junior minister who described the last government’s cuts to special needs supports in schools as immoral has defended his own Government for doing the same.

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn’s cap on numbers of resource teachers and special needs assistants (SNAs) meant schools were told this week to cut extra support teaching by another 12% in September because 4,000 more children than this year qualified.

Brian Hayes, the minister of state at the Department of Finance, said Mr Quinn should be commended for maintaining a €1.3bn special needs budget.

“Ruairi Quinn has to be congratulated for the fact that there haven’t been cuts in this area. We’re not cutting back on the provision here; we’re keeping the provision of the funding that’s there,” he said.

In Apr 2010, as Fine Gael education spokesman, Mr Hayes accused the government of indefensible attacks on children with special needs in a Dáil debate on his motion criticising a Department of Education review, under which he said pupils were having SNA support cut or withdrawn.

“At a time when we are recapitalising the banks, is it not morally indefensible that the current government stands over the abolition of SNAs to the most vulnerable children in Irish education?” Mr Hayes had said.

More than 10,000 SNAs were working in mainstream schools then and almost 10,500 were allocated to schools by the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) last week, leaving 80 more to be approved for children who apply up to mid-autumn before the department’s cap on SNA posts is reached. But the number of children getting SNA help is on the rise, up 2,000 to 22,000.

Since the NCSE announcement, parents say children whose care needs have not fallen will have less SNA support in September, the same kind of cuts Mr Hayes complained of in 2010. These parents will be among thousands protesting on Wednesday at the Dáil, where TDs will have to vote on a Fianna Fáil motion seeking to reverse cuts to resource teaching. The cut is the result of a cap on resource teacher numbers, at the same time that numbers qualifying for their help is up 4,000 to 42,500.

Rallies have also been called around the country, with events in Ennis, Leitrim, and Letterkenny added to those announced for Cork, Limerick, Galway, Boyle, and Athlone.

Despite children having 75% of the resource teaching they should have under department rules, Mr Quinn and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore insisted last week that “there are no cuts”.