The impact of having to wait for support

IN JUNE, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn was given Cabinet approval for 500 additional teachers to be appointed to schools this month.

The move was to allow the National Council for Special Education allocate 85% of recommended resource teaching hours to children with disabilities, rather than the 75% initially proposed by his department a week earlier. The cut had been required to cater for growing numbers of eligible pupils and still remain inside a limit of 5,265 resource teachers that the NCSE can sanction for children with what are termed ‘low-incidence’ learning difficulties, in other words less common disabilities that require individual one-to-one teaching for a number of hours a week.

But because schools could not apply for special education resources for the recently-commenced term after mid-March, the NCSE already had further applications on behalf of 1,414 children for resource teaching up to last Tuesday.