CASE STUDY: 'Our Down Syndrome son doesn’t qualify for set resource hours'

Five-year-old Tom and his sister May, four, will start school next September but their educational needs are quite different.

Tom has Down Syndrome and an IQ of 58 but, unlike most children with the syndrome, he will not have set weekly hours of resource teaching, as his is a mild, rather than a moderate, general learning disability. If he had a diagnosis of an additional disability from a list in the Department of Education’s 2005 rules for the sanctioning of individual resource teaching, he would qualify.

His mum, Sarah Murphy, says his additional needs are much more complex than a typical child with mild general learning disability. Yet, she says, none is enough to tick the right box to qualify him for his own dedicated resource teaching hours.