Children with additional needs are being failed by the State. Some 7,860 children will need special class or school places for this September but the Government has planned for only 5,500 places. That leaves at least 2,300 children without appropriate places and takes no account of possibly hundreds more. These are not statistics; these are children being failed by the State. Parents have been left in limbo weeks out from summer and are unsure if their children will have school places. Some parents have received as many as 14 rejection letters. They are doing everything asked of them and still getting no answers. This is an abject failure of political will.

Will the Government act to guarantee sufficient places, special needs assistants and supports for every child come September? Can it guarantee that the additional funding announced last week is new money and will provide an appropriate place for every child?

First, 7,860 children who have applied for special placements in our schools. That is more than twice the number who did so ahead of the current school year. Please acknowledge that. It is because of the earlier date being forward. Six thousand are already enrolled in schools-----

In appropriate places. They are in the wrong places.

-----and a further 1,400 are preschool-age children. To be very clear, the Government is absolutely committed to meeting the needs of every one of those children. The €646 million approved by the Government is additional to the Estimate that was agreed at budget time. This money is largely to cater for the additionality that has arisen as a result of the change in the system that we brought in with the early date in October.

The investment in special education has been enormous, and rightly so. In the context of all that talk about failure, we have doubled and trebled the numbers across any metric to do with special education.