‘Health workers diagnose disability to secure teaching support’

Some health professionals are diagnosing children with disabilities so they will get extra educational supports, TDs, and Senators were told yesterday.

In a discussion about the need to better define the role of the 10,500 special needs assistants (SNAs), National Council for Special Education chief executive Teresa Griffin said there should be a move away from labelling children just so they qualify for resources in schools. The NCSE is working on plans for a new model for allocating resource teachers to children who currently need a professional assessment verifying a disability or other issue requiring a specific number of weekly hours.

“I was talking to one speech and language therapist and she knew absolutely that the child in front of her did not have a specific speech and language disorder but she was able to make the child fit the criteria,” Ms Griffin told the Oireachtas Education Committee.

While the move to have a diagnosis that qualifies a pupil for special needs supports in school is understandable for parents who want as much resources as possible for a child, Ms Griffin said it should also be remembered that labels are for life. She said the kind of model the NCSE want to move to would mean that, instead of one child being allocated three hours’ resource teaching a week based on their diagnosis or another getting five hours, teachers and schools could decide the supports each pupil needs and phase it out over time as those needs reduce.

The NCSE working group was set up in June and gave Education Minister Ruairi Quinn a progress report last week, but he told the Dáil on Tuesday it will be at least two and a half years before any system that emerges from their work is in use.

National Parents’ Council-Primary chief executive áine Lynch said parents often get caught in a fight for any support rather than a fight for the right support due to a lack of information about their children’s needs and how they should be met effectively. She said there can be negative outcomes for children with challenging behaviour or other complex needs if their SNA is not properly trained to work with them, but also for the SNA themselves, other pupils and the class teacher.

The committee is to draw up a report on the role of SNAs, particularly regarding issues raised by Impact official Dessie Robinson, who said their duties often go far beyond what they should be. He said a cap on SNA numbers in the last four years means the same numbers work with far more children than previously, and some who used to care for one or two children now work with seven at the same school.

Ms Griffin said the NCSE had just 54 appeals in relation to SNA allocations in response to 22,000 applications this year. She said more than half of schools had no change in their SNA numbers, 21% got an increased allocation and 23% have fewer SNAs than last year, but most children’s needs change over time and the focus is on making them independent of supports.