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.

With anything from three to five hours a week typically recommended depending on the category of disability — now, of course, less 15% — the hundreds of additional teachers likely to be allocated to these students will probably not be approved until January at the earliest to ensure Mr Quinn remains within budget in this area.

He said in June that the reversal of the proposed cut in hours would probably lead to another €20m cost for his department next year. However, changes in special needs allocation methods that emerge from an ongoing review could reduce that.

An interim report is due with Mr Quinn in weeks from the hastily convened expert group tasked with reviewing how resources for children with special educational needs are allocated to schools. It is chaired by Eamon Stack, retired chief inspector at the Department of Education and now chair of the NCSE, and will focus on reasons behind a 12% year-on-year in children qualifying for resource teaching.

Among the likely factors is that schools had felt the impact of having to wait almost a year to be given supports for children with special needs, after the first restrictions were introduced in 2011 to stay inside the cap on staffing levels in this area. As a result, there may have been greater efforts to get assessments in on time to qualify for additional teaching hours this September.

In addition, more parents may have stretched to fund private psychological assessments for their children to get an application in on time to the NCSE, rather than wait for a publicly-funded assessment directly by staff of the National Educational Psychological Service or by a private psychologist paid for through NEPS for at least another school year.

The working group chairman was announced by Mr Quinn on the same day in June that he bowed to public pressure over plans to impose another 12% cut in resource teaching hours. But even after the reversal, schools are only being given 85% of the resource teaching time that the department itself recommended in the last major policy review of the system in 2005.

The cuts began months after Mr Quinn took office in 2011, because the department is bound by a cap of 9,950 resource teachers and 10,575 SNAs agreed by the last government with the IMF/EU/ECB troika. The department said it has raised the issue of the caps in its regular discussions with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform about overall staffing restrictions across the education sector.

The Department of Education told the Irish Examiner there is no current intention to amend special needs resource allocation policies until the NCSE Working Group has reported with its recommendations. However, it is unclear if this refers to the interim report due with Mr Quinn shortly, or a final report expected some time early next year.

“Any decisions relating to the current allocation policy will very much depend on what the working Group recommends,” a department spokesperson said.

The working group is now not expected to send an interim report to Mr Quinn, until early October. It will meet this month with interest groups to include representatives of parents, students, teachers, principals, school management bodies, health service professionals, NEPS, school inspectors, advocacy groups, unions and NCSE staff.