The impact of having to wait for support
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.
