Parents of disabled children forced to shell out to avoid supports delays

Parents of children with disabilities are being forced to pay for private assessments to avoid long waits for extra school supports, a parents’ organisation has claimed.

The National Council for Special Education has told schools they must apply by Sept 20, just three weeks into the school year, for resource teachers and special needs assistants (SNAs) for pupils not already given these supports.

Staff were approved for tens of thousands of children in June, but pupils whose schools had not applied by mid-March must wait until all applications received up to Friday week are considered.

The NCSE already had applications for resource teaching hours on behalf of 1,414 children up to a week ago, and applications for SNA support for 282 pupils with care needs.

Lorraine Dempsey, the chairwoman of the Special Needs Parents Association, said there will always be children who cannot get the necessary professional reports on time, no matter what the deadline.

However, she backed comments in yesterday’s Irish Examiner by the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation that it was not fair to expect applications so early in the school year, as special needs might only be identified in the first few weeks of school.

Where schools have limited access to publicly funded assessments needed to support NCSE applications, the only alternative is for parents to pay for private assessments themselves.

“Regardless of income, parents will do their best to come up with the money; very low-income families will scrimp and save to get a report for their child,” said Ms Dempsey. “They might have asked the school, but if other children’s parents have already requested an assessment, they will be too late.”

Most schools have access to a limited number of assessments, mainly by staff of the National Educational Psychological Service.

Under a NEPS-funded scheme, a primary school can also have one child assessed privately for every 50 enrolments, so a school with 200 pupils can get four a year.

The panel of psychologists who can do these assessments was only published yesterday by the Department of Education, which set the NCSE deadline a fortnight earlier than in 2012.

The number of assessments done under the NEPS-funded scheme fell to 2,113 last year, down from 2,457 in 2011 and 2,809 a year earlier.

The Department of Education stressed the fall was due to more psychologists being recruited by NEPS.

The early deadline comes after Education Minister Ruairi Quinn in June agreed not to impose further cuts to resource teaching hours for each child to 75% of those recommended by his own department.

However, they still only get 85%, the same level as last year, because of a limit of 5,265 resource teachers the NCSE can sanction.