Mick Clifford: Decisions on special needs education deserve more than tweet testing

Education Minister's solution to a lack of school places for special needs children provokes an outcry, as does her method of delivering the message

Josepha Madigan announced a plan this week for the education of children with autism that has led to an outcry from parents.

This week there was a perfect example in how not to govern. Minister for Special Education Josepha Madigan took to Twitter to lay out a plan for new centres for children who can’t get a place in their local school. Most, if not all, of these children are on the autism spectrum.

For some reason, the State does not consider their rights to an education as being equal to the rights of most other children.

Now the minister has a solution. Instead of attending a local school, these children can be dispatched to centres, segregated from their peers, displaced, most likely, way beyond their own community.

Initially, there is proposed for four such centres throughout Dublin to cater for up to 80 children who don’t yet have a school place for September.

The numbers outside Dublin are unclear because national data is not retained, but lobby groups say it runs into hundreds.

This scenario persists largely because the Government does not use the law at its disposal to force schools to accommodate children with needs in their locality.

Ms Madigan’s proposal was released to the parents via Twitter, presumably to test reaction.

Ryan Milne, age 11, with his mum Gillian, from Glasnevin in Dublin. The family spoke to Prime Time, three years on from their initial interview in 2019, about the lack of school places for children with autism.

Anybody who has the slightest idea about education and special needs, or even basic parental instincts, could have told her that the answer would be outrage and despair.

The centres are being proposed in response to what her department is calling an emergency.

It is nothing of the sort. An emergency arises when circumstances suddenly change.

There is no emergency in the provision of schooling for children with special needs. The crisis has been going on for years.

The emergency is a political one, involving the requirement to act because of the appalling publicity that has arisen from an appearance on television by a family that couldn’t get places for twin autistic boys.

The Milne familywas forced to open its home to Prime Time — for the second time in three years — in order to get the State to act.

And act it did, with places being found for the twins within days. Now the political imperative is to ensure that no more Milnes end up on TV, telling it like it is.

No political will

Whoever came up with this outrageous proposal should be redeployed to some other area of education.

It is effectively conceding that a wealthy, fully developed State simply does not have the political will to properly cater for all children that they might reach their potential.

But, Ms Madigan appealed on Twitter, this is just a stop-gap measure until she finds the backbone to enforce the law that compels schools to open up special classes.

“I want to stress that this proposal is not a medium or long-term alternative to a special class placement in a school,” she said.

The minister, no doubt, genuinely believes such an aspiration, but history mocks it.

Prefabs in schools were a temporary measure that persisted for 50 years or so.

Then in November 2015, we were told that the emergency had passed.

Prefabs were temporary measures that persisted for over 50 years.

A new school building programme was going to end the era of prefabs.

Then education minister Jan O’Sullivan said that it was a scandal that prefabs had been used for so long to accommodate pupils in more than 600 schools.

“By 2021 the use of prefabs for more than two years will be a rare exception,” she said. “This building programme will deliver on that commitment.”

Five years later, in November 2020, the department revealed that more than 400 schools in the State were still using prefabs. Some of these schools, a response to a parliamentary question revealed, were using the accommodation for as long as 20 years.

“It is sometimes necessary to make use of rented temporary accommodation in order to meet the accommodation needs of schools,” the current education minister Norma Foley noted.

The temporary has also become permanent for children in families without homes. In 2017, then minister for housing Simon Coveney introduced nine family hubs in Dublin as a stop-gap measure between emergency accommodation and housing.

Tenure for families in nine such hubs was to be no longer than six months. At the time, the children’s ombudsman Niall Muldoon welcomed the measure on the basis that it would be “temporary”.

Two years later, Mr Muldoon issued a report that illustrated “feelings of shame and embarrassment” among children in hubs, many of whom had been there since they opened. By 2021, the temporary solution had expanded to include at least 21 such hubs.

If Ms Madigan’s proposal ever sees the light of day you can bet your bottom dollar that it will still be around long after the minister has moved onto other political pastures.

It would be too handy a solution to discontinue, irrespective of how abhorrent it is to the concept of cherishing all children equally.

To blame the incumbent minister exclusively for the crisis would be unfair. Resources are an issue and attempts to deploy more to this area would be resisted in other arms of government. Beyond that, there is no getting away from the reality that some communities and schools are more receptive to fulfilling their obligation than others.

Further segregation

Section 37A of the Education Act provides for the minister to direct schools in an area of need to open special classes. The law has been in force since 2017, yet has only been invoked twice. That of itself is a scandal reflective of the failure of political will to fully support the rights of children with special needs. And now, instead, the supposed answer is to divert them into “centres” rather than provide school places in their own communities.

“It is segregating our children further,” Involve Autism’s Miriam Kenny told Prime Time on Thursday. “What we want for our children is to be educated and have an exceptional education in their own community, just like every other child.”

Once governments tried out a proposal by running it up the flagpole. Today, it’s tested on Twitter.

That’s no way to conduct government, no way to gauge whether parents who have been fighting the system all their children’s lives are willing to put up and shut up.

Ultimately, governing requires that the minister acts. When Ms Madigan was tweeting the defence of her proposal on Wednesday, Cork-based autism class co-ordinator Graham Manning pointed out to her that she had the power to tackle the crisis but she was refusing to use it.

“This bullshit,” Manning tweeted of the proposal on centres “is nothing but a continuation of that refusal. DO YOUR JOB!”. 

It would be hard to think of a better way of putting it.