Apologies have been received from the Cathaoirleach, Cathal Crowe. My name is Senator Gareth Scahill and I will take proceedings today. You are all very welcome.

I ask anyone attending remotely to mute themselves when not contributing in order that we do not pick up any background noise or feedback. As usual, I remind all of those in attendance to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent mode or switched off.

Members attending remotely are reminded of the constitutional requirement that, in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex.

As the witnesses are within the confines of Leinster House, they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the presentation they make to this committee. This means they have an absolute defence against any defamation action for anything they say at the meeting. However, they are expected not to abuse this privilege and it is my duty as Cathaoirleach to ensure it is not abused. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Members are also reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person or entity outside the Houses or an official of the Houses either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

The item on the agenda for today's meeting is inclusive education and the allocation, role and training needs of special education teachers, SETs, and special needs assistants, SNAs. I welcome the following witnesses: Mr. Paul Crone, director, National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, NAPDP; Ms Deirdre Kelly, president, Irish Primary Principals’ Network, IPPN; Dr. Johanna Fitzgerald, national inclusion, special education and research co-ordinator, Education and Training Boards Ireland, ETBI; Mr. Colm Keher, assistant general secretary of the Joint Managerial Body, JMB; Ms Mary Jackson, president, Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools, ACCS; and Ms Angela Dunne, principal and member, National Principals' Forum, NPF. The National Association of Boards of Management in Special Education cannot attend the meeting today. It has extended its apologies and will make a written submission on the issue instead.

I will call on the witnesses to make their opening statements in the following order: Mr. Crone, Ms Kelly, Dr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Keher, Ms Jackson and Ms Dunne. Each will have five minutes. The opening statements will be followed by questions from members of the committee. Each member has a six-minute slot today to ask questions and for the witnesses to respond.

We have a technical glitch at the moment. There will be no clock visible. We are trying to get that resolved. We will be keeping track of the time. I probably will have to enforce more than usual the tapping of the glass. It is nothing personal; if the witnesses do not get to complete their statements, they will be on the public record.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to address members on this important topic. I speak today from the perspective of a school leader working on the front line to deliver inclusive education. Every day, school leaders see the transformative impact special education teachers and special needs assistants have on the lives of young people. We also see the increasing challenges involved in meeting the growing scale and complexity of student needs. Inclusive education is no longer a specialist issue affecting a small number of students. It is now central to the work of every school. Increasing numbers of students are presenting with complex needs that require tailored supports. Schools have embraced this responsibility because we believe every child has the right to participate, belong and succeed within their local school community. However, if inclusion is to become a lived reality for all students, schools must have the staffing, expertise and supports necessary to deliver it effectively. The special education teacher is at the heart of this work. The role has evolved significantly in recent years. SETs are no longer simply providers of additional teaching hours. They are key members of school support teams who assess needs, design interventions, support classroom teachers, liaise with families and external agencies and promote inclusive practice throughout the school. As student needs become increasingly complex, the demands placed on SETs continue to grow yet one of the most significant challenges facing schools is the shortage of teachers with specialist expertise and qualifications in special education.

It is important to acknowledge the positive steps that have been taken. In particular, the introduction of the compulsory special education placement within initial teacher education programmes is a welcome development. It recognises that inclusive education is not the responsibility of a small group of specialists but a core competency for every teacher entering the profession. However, while this reform is an important step forward, it does not address the existing training deficit within the system. Many teachers currently working as special education teachers have had limited opportunities for formal specialist preparation for the role they are doing. These teachers are highly committed professionals often supporting students with the most complex needs in the education system without access to the specialist training such roles increasingly require. We need a coherent national framework for professional learning in special education that spans initial teacher education, induction and continuous professional development. Specialist qualifications and accredited pathways must be expanded so that every school has access to appropriately trained personnel capable of supporting diverse student needs.

Allocation is also a critical issue. The move towards a needs-based allocation model for SETs is welcome and provides schools with greater flexibility to respond to local need. However, its effectiveness depends on timely communication. School leaders require certainty regarding allocations at the earliest possible stage to facilitate recruitment, timetabling and planning.

The same principles applies to special needs assistants. The recently published SNA workforce development plan is a welcome recognition of the vital role SNAs play in supporting inclusion within our schools. Every day, SNAs support students to access education, participate fully in school life and develop independence. Their contribution to student well-being, engagement and inclusion cannot be overstated. As student needs become more complex, it is important that SNAs have access to high-quality induction and ongoing professional learning. Equally important is maintaining clarity regarding the distinct but complementary roles of teachers and SNAs. Teachers remain responsible for teaching and learning while SNAs provide the care and access supports that enable students to participate fully in education. Clear guidance and opportunities for collaborative practice are essential. From a school leader perspective, timely allocation of SNA support remains a significant challenge. Delays in confirming allocations create difficulties for workforce planning and can impact preparations for students with complex needs particularly those transitioning from primary school.

Finally, inclusive education cannot be delivered by schools acting alone. Teachers and SNAs work most effectively when supported by educational psychologists and disability and therapeutic services. Too often, schools find themselves attempting to bridge gaps created by delays or shortages elsewhere in the system. As school leaders, our commitment to inclusive education is unwavering but inclusion cannot be delivered through goodwill alone. It requires investment in people, expertise and capacity. Adequately staffed schools with highly trained special education teachers and special needs assistants supported by robust professional development and resources are essential if students with additional educational needs are to thrive. While commitment to inclusion exists in our schools, the challenge now is to ensure policy, workforce planning and professional development keep pace. By investing in the allocation, training and support of SETs and SNAs, we can create an education system where every young person has the opportunity not simply to participate but to flourish.

I thank the Chair and members of the committee for the invitation to appear today on behalf of the Irish Primary Principals' Network.

I have been a teaching principal for the past 19 years. Alongside my role representing IPPN, I experience at first hand the realities of leading schools while teaching full time. IPPN is acutely aware of both the opportunities and challenges that exist in striving to provide an inclusive education for all children. We therefore welcome the committee's focus on inclusive education and special educational needs provision. IPPN is the officially recognised professional body for over 6,000 primary school principals and deputy principals. Through our engagement with school leaders, we see an unwavering commitment to inclusion. School leaders, teachers, SNAs and wider school communities work tirelessly to ensure every child is welcomed, supported and enabled to participate fully in school life. The central message of our submission is straightforward. The challenge facing schools is most certainly not a lack of commitment to inclusion; the challenge is that the conditions necessary for effective inclusion do not currently exist in our schools.

Inclusive education must be understood in its broadest sense. It is about enabling participation, supporting well-being, raising achievement and fostering a genuine sense of belonging for every child. To achieve that, schools require adequate staffing, timely access to resources, appropriate training, specialist supports and sufficient leadership capacity. At present, there is a growing gap between policy ambition and operational reality.

In January 2026, IPPN surveyed more than 1,000 school leaders regarding the provision of additional educational supports in mainstream schools.

The scale of that response provides a highly reliable picture of what is happening in schools. The findings are stark. Almost 80% of school leaders reported that their allocation of special education teacher hours is insufficient to meet the needs of pupils requiring support. More than 60% reported that their allocation of SNAs is insufficient to meet identified care needs, more than 83% reported that there are children in their schools who require SET support but cannot currently access it, while over 85% reported a similar situation regarding SNA support. The consequence is that schools are regularly forced into impossible decisions about prioritisation. School leaders and special education teams are trying to stretch finite resources across growing and increasingly complex needs. When resources do not match need, support is delayed, intervention time is reduced and outcomes for children are compromised.

A key issue identified by our members is that the current resource allocation models are driven largely by predetermined budgetary limits rather than the actual level of need presenting in our schools. Yet schools hold much of the data required to accurately identify that need. If we are really serious about inclusion, resource allocation must be informed by current evidence and actual demand.

We also wish to draw the committee's attention to the increasing prevalence of behaviours of concern and crisis situations in schools. Our survey found that almost 65% of staff who responded to crisis situations had received absolutely no training before doing so. More than half of schools reported that a staff member had been injured while responding to a crisis incident. School staff are committed to adopting neuroaffirmative and trauma-informed approaches. We recognise that behaviour is communication. However, commitment alone is insufficient. We require access to training for all members of staff, as well as specialist supports and multidisciplinary services, if we are to respond safely and effectively.

We wish to highlight the leadership dimension of special education provision. In most schools, responsibility for co-ordinating special educational needs provision falls to a special educational needs co-ordinator, SENCO, or a member of the leadership team. Yet in 67% of our primary schools, the person carrying out this responsibility receives no allocated leadership time whatsoever. In a further 22% of schools, this responsibility rests with a teaching principal who is already teaching full-time for most of the week.

The reality is that the successful co-ordination of special education provision depends heavily on goodwill and personal commitment. This is neither sustainable nor fair to schools, staff, children or families. The role of SENCO should be formally recognised, supported and resourced, and school leaders must be provided with the time necessary to lead inclusion effectively.

In our submission, we make six recommendations, which are moving to a needs-led resourcing model, guaranteeing timely allocations, increasing SET and SNA capacity, investing in behaviour and safety supports, establishing the role of SENCO on a statutory basis and strengthening leadership capacity in schools. If the State aspires to provide a genuinely inclusive education system then resources, staffing, training, specialist supports and leadership capacity must be aligned with the actual needs of children. School leaders are committed to delivering inclusion. Our message today is that they need the system around them to be equally committed.

I thank the committee members. We look forward to engaging with their questions.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it. I am speaking on behalf of the education and training board sector. I also highlight my role as a special education teacher educator in Mary Immaculate College. I am currently on secondment with ETBI.

I will begin by acknowledging the Department of Education and Youth and the NCSE, which are responding at pace to extraordinary pressure in the system. Ireland is dealing with very significant growth in the number of students seeking specialist placements and the complexity of need presenting across schools. The response is visible in multiple consultation and research undertakings, including the EPSEN review, the SNA workforce development plan, the engagement with the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, EASNIE, technical support instrument, the development of SET guidelines, the formation of education therapy service, curricular reform across primary, special, and post-primary schools, and wider consultation and reform processes.

The question we ask is how we make sure increased funding, increased provision and increased policy activity translate into a connected, coherent and sustainable impact at school level. From an ETB perspective, this is where the next phase of effort now needs to focus. Across 16 ETBs, the sector supports more than 300,000 learners annually in schools, in further education and training and in youth and community education. In the schools sector alone, ETBs include 250 post-primary schools, 33 community national schools and 16 special schools, including hospital schools, with a further four special schools opening in 2026. This breadth gives the sector a practical, cross-system view of what schools may need next.

We need to recognise special schools a distinct sector. The system needs to recognise the uniqueness and diversity of special schools, which vary widely in their size, learner profile, staffing, local supports and historical special education review committee, SERC, and SNA arrangements. A single rigid model no longer fits. Each school requires context-sensitive arrangements and supports. The current primary designated status is increasingly misaligned, given that more than 50% of students are of post-primary age. We recommend a shift from a designation-based model to a needs-based, context-specific model, recognising each special school as a unique ecosystem. In that context, we welcome the move towards needs-based provision across all settings and away from diagnostic gatekeeping. The current SNA and SERC model is outdated and no longer adequate for complex needs. Agencies such as NEPS, Oide, the inspectorate, the NCSE and the HSE still operate without a shared protocol, resulting in inconsistent access to supports. Many special schools also lack specialist post-primary facilities despite the age profile of their students.

Further priorities for special schools include strengthening teaching and learning through access to post-primary subject facilities, creating a shared national protocol for special schools across support agencies, addressing infrastructure and capital deficits, especially where schools are in temporary or retrofitted buildings, planning for tiered specialist roles such as SENCOs, special education teachers and home-school community liaison teachers, and using ETB architectures to enable structured transitions to further education and training. Within the ETB sector work is under way to look at planning effective transitions between the levels of education within ETBs. Special schools of the future could function as regional, multidisciplinary hubs, operating on inclusive campuses and sharing specialist facilities and supports, with student need and not designation determining provision.

We need to capitalise on what is already showing promise in the system. I want to emphasise the realising inclusive special education, RISE, strategy, which is a research and knowledge mobilisation partnership between ETBI and Mary Immaculate College. The RISE strategy is a strong example of how collaborative, cross-sector working can build sustainable capacity for inclusive teaching and learning. Across more than 230 of the 250 ETB post-primary schools, with some cross-sectoral engagement with the Joint Managerial Body and the Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools, ACCS, the RISE strategy supports schools through school self-evaluation, provision mapping, leadership development, collaborative inquiry and reflective use of data. It complements national supports rather than duplicating them and offers an approach that is systematic, data-informed, collaborative and scalable.

We need to build the workforce. Inclusive reform succeeds where systems invest in career-long professional learning, leadership for inclusion and collaborative support structures for teachers, school leaders, SETs, SNAs and other key personnel. In recent research analysing special education policies across various countries, the Scope SEND study places Ireland among the jurisdictions most aligned with a needs-based, socially responsive approach. It identifies Ireland as having a relatively strong professional learning culture but finds implementation becomes difficult where systems remain fragmented or insufficiently connected. The future priority must, therefore, be coherent, school-embedded and scalable capacity-building with not only external inputs but structures that support learning in practice in schools over time. We also welcome the SNA workforce development plan but future development must ensure that SNA allocation, role design and professional learning are increasingly aligned to student profiles and school context.

I will stop Dr. Fitzgerald there. The time is up. The statement has been circulated to members and will be published on the committee's website. There may be an opportunity to come back and focus on the other points at the end.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it this morning.. The Joint Managerial Body, JMB, represents the management of voluntary secondary schools, which comprise more than half of Ireland’s post-primary schools.

As a recognised management organisation under the Education Act, the JMB supports school management in providing the highest quality education for every student. Our schools are deeply committed to inclusive education. They work every day to ensure that young people can participate, belong and succeed. However, they are doing so in the context of growing complexity and increasing demands on limited resources. For the JMB, inclusion means maximising, to the greatest extent appropriate, the meaningful participation, learning and progress of students in mainstream classrooms. Inclusion must go beyond placement. It must be experienced by students through participation, access to learning, appropriate support, belonging and genuine progress. An inclusive system must also retain a strong continuum of provision, including special classes and special schools where these best meet students’ needs.

The scale of the challenge is considerable. Nationally, approximately one in four students in mainstream classes is supported through special education provision. The ESRI research commissioned by JMB points to real support pressures. In our schools, 11% of students disagreed that they received all the supports they needed to learn. Students who received extra subject help viewed individual or small-group support more favourably than larger group support. This tells us that inclusion is not simply about access to mainstream schools. It is about whether students receive the right support in the right setting at the right time. Inclusive education cannot be delivered by aspiration alone. It requires sustained investment in people, professional capacity, and school infrastructure.

Mainstream teachers need ongoing professional learning to meet an increasingly diverse range of needs. That must begin in initial teacher education and continue throughout a teacher’s career. Teachers need a deep knowledge of how to meet the needs of the students they teach. This also requires structured teacher collaboration. Inclusion in post-primary classrooms depends on every teacher knowing the students in front of them and their strengths, needs, learning profiles, support plans and the strategies that work for them. That cannot depend on chance, goodwill or informal conversations. Our school staff members need protected and scheduled opportunities to plan together, review progress, share knowledge and co-ordinate supports. This must be achieved without reducing students’ access to teaching time. Schools need greater specialist expertise and leadership. The role of the core special education team now involves identifying and prioritising need, co-ordinating provision, supporting classroom teachers, liaising with parents and external professionals and ensuring that resources are deployed effectively. The JMB is, therefore, calling for expanded ring-fenced SEN co-ordination time, supported by senior leadership that can devote time to promoting inclusive education.

Schools need stronger core teaching capacity. The pupil-teacher ratio must be reduced. A reduced ratio is essential for broad subject choice, flexible pathways, differentiated teaching, and meaningful inclusion in mainstream classrooms. Students need access to appropriate specialist and therapeutic supports. Guidance counselling must be strengthened. Students must have timely access to psychological, psychotherapeutic and other therapeutic services where required. These supports will help students to access learning, self-regulate, participate and remain successfully included in school life. Schools need the leadership capacity to manage inclusion properly. The JMB welcomes the recent clarification of the SNA role. However, schools with significant SNA allocations also require appropriate in-school management structures. A school with no SNAs receives the same management resourcing as a school with a large SNA team. This is not sustainable. School buildings must also support inclusion. Inclusive education requires suitable classrooms, sensory spaces, social spaces, specialist rooms and safe circulation areas.

The JMB fully supports the ambition of inclusive education. Our schools have been at the forefront of this work and remain fully committed to it. However, meaningful inclusion requires more than goodwill. It requires properly resourced teachers, specialist expertise, protected collaboration time, effective senior school leadership, therapeutic supports and learning environments that enable every student to flourish. The policy question is not whether schools support inclusion, they do. The question is whether the education system is prepared to provide the conditions that make meaningful inclusion possible.

I thank the Chair and members for the opportunity to address them on behalf of the ACCS on inclusive education. The ACCS represents schools founded on a commitment to broad, accessible and inclusive education for all young people in their communities. That founding purpose is still central, but the context in which schools are working has changed significantly.

Post-primary schools now support students with an increasingly wide range of learning, care, communication, sensory, social, emotional and behavioural needs. Students in mainstream classes may be supported through team teaching, small group support, one-to-one intervention and wider whole-school supports. Students in special classes are supported within these classes and also may move during the school day between the special class setting and mainstream. Inclusive education is therefore not a separate programme or a separate space within a school. It is a whole-school responsibility and must be planned, resourced and led as such. The ACCS wishes to highlight five connected areas, which are allocation and deployment, SEN leadership, teacher education and training, the role of the SNA and equity of access.

The first area is the allocation and deployment of special education teachers, SETs. For the 2026-27 school year, Circular 12/26 confirms that the post-primary SET allocation model distributes hours across the system using three pillars. These are enrolment, special teaching needs profile and educational disadvantage. At a system level, 25% of the hours are allocated by enrolment, 68.5% by educational needs profile and 6.5% by educational disadvantage using the most up-to-date data available. The model gives schools autonomy to manage and deploy additional teaching support based on identified learning needs. That autonomy is welcome, but it must be matched by a fair, transparent and responsive model. If schools are to deliver genuinely inclusive education programmes, the allocation criteria must have the capacity to reflect changing demographics and the increasing number of students with complex needs in mainstream settings. Where a school profile does not reflect its current reality, the review process must be accessible, transparent, timely and capable of delivering a meaningful response.

The second area is SEN leadership. Schools need dedicated, ring-fenced SEN leadership and co-ordinated time. A previous joint submission to the Department of Education and Youth in 2024 by the three post-primary management bodies proposes that this be calculated as an additional 10% of each school’s SET allocation and deployed to experienced core SETs and SENCOs for leadership and co-ordination purposes. This is not simply administrative time. It is about building the capacity of a school to deliver inclusive education and requires specialist leadership. It requires a leader to guide and support staff to implement inclusive practices. It requires leadership for whole-school inclusion planning and the creation of practices that are flexible and adaptive to needs. There are also mandatory governance and compliance requirements to be fulfilled. Inclusive special education now involves assessment of need, student support planning, school provision plans, deployment and management of SETs and SNAs, transition planning, comprehensive family engagement, NCSE liaison, reasonable accommodations for State exams, annual reviews, provision mapping, data-informed decision-making and whole-staff capacity building. This cannot be left to goodwill or absorbed into already stretched leadership structures. SENCOs and core SETs need protected time to work with senior leadership and lead school-wide inclusive practice. A distributed SEN leadership model, working shoulder to shoulder with senior leadership, would strengthen accountability and make better use of the substantial public investment in special education.

I thank Ms Jackson. I realise she has more to go through, but her submission will be on the committee website. There will be an opportunity to come back to a couple of the points.

I am here to represent the National Principals’ Forum. As a practising principal for the past 15 years and a teacher for the past 25 years, I thank the committee for inviting us to contribute to today’s discussion on inclusive education. We appreciate the opportunity. I also thank the clerks, who have been so helpful.

We are an independent, practitioner-led organisation representing the operational perspectives of primary school leaders across Ireland.

At the outset, I wish to make one point absolutely clear: primary school principals believe in inclusion. Every day, schools across Ireland welcome children with increasingly diverse and complex needs. We believe that every child deserves to belong, participate and flourish in their local school. The question before us today is, therefore, not whether inclusion is the right aspiration, but whether the systems designed to support inclusion are keeping pace with the reality now being experienced in our schools on the ground. The concerns we present today are not isolated experiences. They reflect consistent patterns reported by school leaders across Ireland for several years.

In preparing our submission, we surveyed primary schools across Ireland. The findings were remarkably consistent. Schools support inclusive education but they are increasingly concerned that the systems supporting inclusion are no longer keeping pace with the changing needs presenting in our schools. Over 80% of responding schools believe that their current SET allocation does not adequately meet pupil need. Similar figures report insufficient levels of SNA support to match the growing level of need and complexity in schools. Almost every school reports that delays in external assessments and therapeutic services are impacting their ability to support children. Perhaps most significantly, a clear majority of principals do not believe that the current system has an accurate picture of the special educational needs profile within their schools.

Any allocation system is only as good as the information on which it is based. We believe that an information gap lies at the heart of many of the challenges facing inclusive education. Existing data, based on historic or proxy indicators, show the Department where resources have gone, not how need has changed or evolved, but schools know. Schools already collect detailed information about children’s needs through the continuum of support, student support plans and ongoing review. We identify these needs because we must meet them every day. We know when needs change, whether through new enrolments, increasing complexity or children receiving diagnoses while attending school, yet there is no national mechanism through which that information routinely informs educational planning or allocations. For almost a decade, schools have had no routine mechanism to update the changing profile of need through the primary online database or an equivalent system. The result is the information gap we alert the committee to, between what schools know and what the national system routinely sees.

We describe the consequence as needs inflation. As educational need grows, largely static allocations become progressively less effective. Schools are expected to respond to increasing need with broadly the same specialist capacity. Over time, effective capacity reduces, not because resources have been removed but because they have not kept pace with changing need. This is having a significant impact on the delivery of inclusive education on the ground.

This is neither an argument for returning to diagnosis-led allocation nor an argument against inclusion. Rather, it is a proposal for ensuring that inclusion is underpinned by accurate information, responsive planning and sufficient capacity. We believe that inclusion is not simply about where a child is educated. It is about ensuring that every child has access to the level of support they need to participate and succeed, wherever they are educated. That is why our submission proposes that the next phase of inclusive education should focus on a framework of reform strengthening five interconnected areas: policy, information, capacity, governance and outcomes.

Our recommendations are practical and evidence informed but they all stem from one central proposition, which is that schools are not asking to decide policy but to inform it. Schools are best placed to know what is needed in them.

Schools already hold much of the information needed to strengthen planning. We simply need a national system that can use it. Accurate information leads to better planning, which enables more responsive allocations, which in turn strengthens school capacity. Stronger schools deliver better outcomes for children.

Schools are working under growing pressure, and school leaders are increasingly required to translate the ambition of inclusive education into operational reality while responding to needs that continue to evolve faster than the systems designed to support them.

External agencies may understandably operate waiting lists. Schools cannot. Children arrive every morning, and schools must respond immediately, regardless of whether external supports are available. Schools do so willingly, but goodwill cannot indefinitely substitute for system capacity.

If Ireland is to continue strengthening its commitment to inclusive education, then rights-based aspirations must be matched by rights-based resourcing, accurate data, responsive allocation systems and effective interagency collaboration. The decisions made by this committee represent an opportunity to shape not only the future of inclusive education but also the capacity of schools to deliver it successfully for years to come. Our purpose today is not to criticise, but to contribute constructively.

School leaders are proud of what has been achieved. We simply believe that the next stage of inclusive education should be informed by those responsible for delivering inclusion every day on the ground. We are not asking the committee to lower its ambition. We have one main ask: that better information inform the system supporting schools, in order to strengthen the sustainability of inclusive education into the future. Ultimately, inclusive education is no longer defined by the aspiration to include every child. It is defined by our collective capacity to ensure that every child receives the support they need once they are included.

I thank the members and look forward to their questions.

I thank Ms Dunne. That leads us to members’ questions. As I said at the start, members will have six minutes to make their points, ask their questions and obtain their responses. The clock is working here again, so we will know when the time is up.

I thank all of our guests for being here today. It will be a busy morning.

I wish to refer to a sentence in ETBI's submission. We are always trying to figure out how to help children of all abilities thrive in school and listening to what witnesses have to say, but it is good to start off with some positivity. I appreciate that ETBI acknowledges that the Department of education and the NCSE are responding at pace to extraordinary pressure on the system. It is important to have that point on the record.

Let me proceed to my questions. The need for better and more training has come up in nearly all of the guests’ submissions. The ACCS says that a newly qualified teacher should not leave initial teacher education without a clear understanding of the inclusive education landscape and the confidence to participate effectively in it. At the moment, do the witnesses think there is enough training at third level? Do they feel that students are not properly prepared? Do they feel that when they leave college, they are choosing more mainstream schools than special schools?

I noticed that the IPPN mentioned that 65% of staff who had responded to crisis situations had received no training before doing so. Why is that?

On training, the witnesses say that the NCSE and Oide offer important training opportunities but that teachers must be able to access them during professional time. I note in another submission a joint proposal from the JMB, the ACCS and ETBI for three half-day exceptional school closures across two school years at post-primary level. Is that what the witnesses believe might be necessary to train more teachers, given the needs of students at the moment? I seek answers on the training aspect first. I have loads more questions but I might have to ask them on another occasion.

In our sector, about 65% of our teachers pursue their teacher training through postgraduate courses and the rest through undergraduate courses. Inclusive education, up to now, has really been an optional add-on. Placement has largely been neglected in the SET area. Pedagogy, including an understanding of teaching and what is involved, as well as teachers’ role as teachers of all students in their care, as outlined in the National Educational Psychological Service document in 2010, is very important going forward. That needs to be addressed. In the recent technical support instrument, TSI, project with the EU, which I was involved in, this was outlined in the roadmap prepared for Ireland as one of the key areas that needed to be addressed to promote true inclusion in schools.

Initial teacher education is where teachers develop their theoretical knowledge. It was mentioned here that the mandatory specialist placement-, in initial teacher education was very much welcomed. I believe that 80% of the education budget goes on salaries, so the in-service aspect is also critical. Students at initial teacher education level, that is, pre-service level, will now be immersed in specialist placements. Hopefully, they will have opportunities down the line to interact and collaborate with therapists, now that we have the education therapy service. In this regard, I refer to the collaborative, shared-space element. That will expose them to and immerse them in working with students and children with additional needs. However, it is a matter of applied knowledge at in-service level.

Let me refer to the Senator’s statement about the joint submission from the three post-primary management bodies. This matter is equally relevant to the special school and primary sectors in terms of the time for in-school, context-specific, collaborative and critical thinking around how we enact a particular policy, translate it into our context and gather our own data to determine how the policy responds to the strengths and needs of our students.

When 80% of the Department's budget is on salaries, the investment in sustainable professional learning and development within contexts, which is a recommendation coming from the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, EASNIE, technological support instrument, TSI, report, is data driven from within the school to identify the needs. We know from research and our initiatives within the ETB sector that communities of practice, whether they are within the school or between school networks, are an effective, impactful and sustainable model of professional learning.

What are the witnesses’ thoughts on the removal of the psychological reports? It is not required to have the psychological reports now. Does anyone wish to comment?

It is a good thing because we have had a lot of diagnostic gatekeeping that just sees children and young people on waiting lists. In schools, schools have to respond. It was mentioned that children show up in schools every day, so teachers, SNAs and school leaders have to respond. The move to a needs-based approach, which was introduced in 2017, has represented an enormous paradigm shift for the entire system. When we look at other countries that have moved to that, we see it is a good thing. The Scope SEND study that referenced systems that have moved to needs-based found that when they engage with empirical research with parents and users in that system, they have a more positive experience of the system as a result.

The new assistive technology circular that will come out just before September is going to be such a game-changer in terms of the schools being able to decide who gets the assistive technology. It is something that I have been working on. That is a bit of a game-changer here. I thank the witnesses. My time is up.

Gabhaim buíochas leis na finnéithe ar fad as ucht a bheith anseo agus as ucht na ráiteas tosaigh. I wish to go back to the issue of teaching training briefly because Senator Nelson Murray asked the majority of my questions. I spent the majority of my teaching career as an SET. I did not get adequate training at all. Everything that I learned was from my colleagues or the courses that I did. There is so much that should be covered within the training, including inclusive pedagogy, universal design for learning, UDL, behaviour support, autism-informed practice, differentiated assessment, team teaching, collaborative planning and communication with SNAs. Are training colleges covering all of this at the moment? It is 20 years or more since I was in college. Is the upskilling in these areas happening in teachers' personal time or is it happening on professional time? I did a lot of courses in my personal time. Is that still happening? Are the training courses currently certificate-led or cumulative? Are there patchwork bits and pieces happening with no overall direction when a teacher is doing all these courses?

I can take a little bit on that. That is a significant deficit in our system at the minute. There is no Teaching Council registration for a special education teacher. We work on the assumption that every teacher is a teacher of special education, and they are to an extent. However, the special educational course that schools struggle to get teachers on, which was funded by the Department of education, does not have the capacity to support schools sufficiently. A lot of teachers are taking it in their own time. They are doing weekend courses, online courses and all of that. They are setting up their own collaborative networks and sharing ideas within the school. There needs to be a coherent framework for that training, engagement with the higher education institutions to provide training in that area and, equally, for it to be recognised in The Teaching Council as a specific category, not just a teacher of English.

I am aware of a number of situations where SNAs are upskilling and doing a level 8 degree in special education provision. With the level 8 degree, they can do a professional master of education, PME. They will become a specialist special education teacher. That coherent framework needs to be developed and put in place in collaboration with all of the stakeholders, the higher education institutions, the NCSE and the Department to create that pathway of expertise.

To qualify as a special education teacher, it is postgraduate master’s level. As Mr. Crone mentioned, it is funded by the Department. They have increased the number of places this year. We very much welcome that, but it is always oversubscribed. Regarding one of the points around the postgraduate level qualification as an SET, a key part of that professional learning and development across the HEIs is around leadership development because they become an asset to the school. They become a resource for the entire school in terms of advocacy, mentoring and coaching, as well as direct teaching, assessment and all the things Ms Jackson identified. However, one of the challenges around it is retaining people within the roles because of the workload and the impact. We have just conducted some research on the SENCO role, for example, which indicates that there is a higher level of postgraduate special education qualifications among post-primary SENCOs and SETs rather than primary. That is simply because primary SENCOs are principals and deputy principals by default. The postgraduate level qualification and the building of that core dedicated team is critical to it.

At undergraduate level and pre-service teaching, there are core modules and elements. I echo what Mr. Crone said about an incoherent patchwork. It really screams for a national charter or forum where everybody comes together, including the education centres, the NCSE and HEIs to look at and map the landscape of professional learning and development in a coherent way to ensure that it is not just the special education teachers, but it is the support and ecosystem around them that supports the development of coherence and avoids duplication in terms of professional learning and development.

While we welcome the two-week placement in teacher training college, two weeks is not a significant length of time to prepare a student for moving into a role in special education. From my experience as a school principal, when teachers finish training college, we are not exactly sure what has been covered as regards special education settings and what knowledge they have. It would be great if we had a database that says what students know or have experienced. Regarding SETs in school, they are upskilling in their personal time. They are doing it in the evenings and at weekends. Access to the courses is very difficult. What we end with, and what we do want, is a train the trainer, where there is one SET who has attended the course and they are feeling that huge responsibility of sharing all that knowledge with the rest of the SET team. That is a serious responsibility when that is coming down on top of a teacher. What we would like is coherent training that is for all SETs. All SETs should have access to the same training.

To add to what my colleagues have said, the training episode should be certificate-led because it is a school-wide responsibility. It should be cumulative and capable of building recognised expertise over time. That is for teachers who are already in the system and it is for all teachers as well as the specialist training that has been mentioned before.

I thank all the witnesses for being here. I wish to focus in first, based on what I have looked at from ACCS, IPPN and Ms Dunne, on how the SET hours are allocated. The witnesses will have to excuse me because I my voice is croaky. That is why I stepped outside for a minute. I visit a lot of schools in my constituency. I am my party's spokesperson on education and youth. Not a week goes by without me being in at least one school - usually more. This is particularly in relation to primary level, but I would like answers from all the witnesses on this. There has been huge concern raised with me about how the hours are arrived at. Ms Jackson mentioned how the circular determines the hours that are allocated and 68.5% by educational needs profile. Ms Kelly had some very interesting data from a survey the association did on what hours schools are getting and how many students they believe are missing out on the hours they need. Ms Dunne touched on a point that has been raised with me in a lot of schools in my constituency around access to POD and giving that data from the school directly back to the Department of education. That is where I wish to focus all my time because it is raised with me so much.

I want to get the witnesses' feedback, particularly on the pupil online database, POD, side because it was raised here today and it has been said to me by so many principals in my constituency. In terms of getting those hours for primary and post primary, as was mentioned in some of the submissions, do the witnesses feel a budgetary issue is the reason for not accessing that data in what could be real time?

What we are seeing in our schools is that currently 25% of the allocation is set hours. When we looked at the need within our schools, the actual figure is 30%. Immediately, there is a gap or a mismatch. We are not having the correct allocation for our schools. Once we have those inefficient allocations, the whole school system as regards allocating resources is coming under pressure. What we also notice is that if we really want to talk about inclusion then we need to have adequate resources. If the Government really wants to find out what the need is in schools it should come to us. We have the information about the children in our schools. We can tell the Government the need that is there. We have the student support files and the expertise as special education teachers. Making an assumption that is out of date by 5% or considerably more probably in reality means that we are immediately into a difficult era with it. I want to give time to other people to answer.

Some weeks ago the Deputy came to our school and we explained very clearly what the situation was. There is a case study in the submission that we have given to the Oireachtas joint committee with a specific school and a national picture on how the information gap is impacting on the ground. The former model pre-2017 was diagnosis led and it was very limited because we could not give access to children without a diagnosis. We welcome the change to a needs-based approach but it based on the assumption that we have enough of an allocation to meet children's needs. While significant progress has been made in inclusive education, I do not believe that the allocations have kept pace with the changing complexity and prevalence of need in our schools, because the Department does not have oversight of the information that schools have access to.

We already work within a national framework, namely, the NCSE's inclusive education framework. We identify the needs of our children because we have to meet them every day. We document them through the continuum of support and the student support plans, but that information is largely in house. We cannot feed that into a database anywhere. Before the new model of set allocation and the continuum of support came in we had access to the POD where we could tick two boxes. One was to say a child was in receipt of low-incidence hours, which were formerly resource hours and one was to tick a box to say a child was in receipt of SNA access. Those boxes disappeared with the advent of the new model. For at least eight years the Department has had no data on complex needs in our schools. It was formerly an indicator alongside enrolment and disadvantage and so on. It was removed and parents and principals objected strongly to this. I know why it was removed. The HSE was not providing accurate or timely data on complex needs because of the waiting lists. I understand that but I do not understand why schools were overlooked in being asked for this information. It would not create an administrative burden on schools because we already document this. We just need a mechanism and it is already there. We are not trying to dictate policy. We just want to inform it. It is for the Department and the NCSE to decide what mechanism is used. The POD is already there but maybe there is a new mechanism that the Government wants to devise but we thoroughly welcome it because we want it to see what we see.

I agree that the big gap is the complex needs and the reporting of that within a school. While the old model of the psychological report-driven allocation on the high incidence and low incidence needed to go, I agree with my colleagues that there is no way of reporting on complex needs or changing needs in a school. Very quickly there can be changing needs in a school which require resources. There is no real mechanism for responding to that. The allocation is a very broad or crude method, for want of a better word. There has to be some mechanism for allocating resources but there is a piece missing. Schools are best placed to respond to that and not dictate their own resources. They have the autonomy to manage their teaching support and that is very welcome but they need to report and have an accessible, transparent, timely and capable way of delivering a meaningful response if there are changing needs within a school.

It is the same question, so maybe we can continue and allow others to come in on the same issue because what the witnesses have to say in terms of the SET allocation model and how it can be improved is really important. Does anyone else want to come in on it?

It is a multifaceted area. I represent the voluntary secondary schools but post-primary schools are extraordinarily complex organisations. There is an extraordinary range of students within our schools. The school bell rings every 40 minutes and a teacher meets a completely new set of students. How the allocation is given life on the ground in making a difference for our students cannot be ignored. The thrust of the joint managerial body's submission is about making sure that we have the management structures in place within our schools in order that all of the data about our students enables us to build our teaching practices within our mainstream classes on a very sound knowledge of the needs of the students in front of us. That speaks to the earlier discussion about teacher training and to the management structure within our schools. Our senior leaders within our schools are extraordinarily hard pressed. As I said, schools have become extraordinarily complex organisations. All of that needs to be managed and led and a resourcing of senior and middle leadership management within our schools has not matched the pace of change that we have seen over the past 20 years, in particular. As a result, our principals and deputy principals are under enormous pressure. We are submitting that every school should have a deputy principal for every 300 pupils. That is a starting point in a way, because all of that has to be played out. Our special educational needs co-ordination teams also need to be resourced, as I said, to ensure that the allocations are making a difference to our students' lives. All of that needs to be co-ordinated. The information needs to be shared in a meaningful way with our teachers and we need to make sure that our students are benefiting from the allocation.

Does anyone else want to come in on the information gap?

When it became evident that the information from the disability network teams was not there in relation to complex needs, the Department, to be fair to it, went through. It brought stakeholders in and gave us a look under the bonnet as to how it was calculating that allocation. The commitment now is that it is done annually. It used to be done every two or three years. The profile of a school is now changing annually, based on the information. While there is still a deficit around complex needs, we need to be quite careful. Other jurisdictions have gone down the road of giving autonomy at school level. In other words, a school gets a pot of money and it decides on what it allocates the money to. That has moved many schools away from inclusion and equity. We need to be mindful of that while we also need to keep pursuing having the up-to-date and relevant data that we need. It is important that we keep equity in mind, as distinct from equality. Equity means that those who need a little bit more need to get that little bit more.

In that international experience what happens instead?

They have a bit of autonomy. Some schools put a huge amount of resources into special education teachers. Some schools put resources into home-school liaison teachers or mainstream teachers. As a result, students with special needs tend to cluster in schools.

We do not have a definition of what a "complex need" is in the system. It is very difficult then to see if we have enough of an allocation. As sector representing primary, post-primary and special schools, complex needs can mean different things in each of those settings. Therefore, schools that engage in their own data gathering should be trusted and that information should be used to develop the profile to inform a more responsive allocation model. Obviously, there is not an unlimited budget for the area of special education. However, when we look at systems that moved to needs-based allocation models, such as in Scotland and Australia, between 40% and 50% of student populations present with some additionality in the system.

For budgeting estimations in Ireland, we are reflecting 25%. The budgeting for special education probably needs to be revised.

If I may clarify from a primary school perspective - it is slightly different at second level - in terms of the SET allocation model, the same pillars are used to allocate it but it does not capture a full picture of the school every year. For example, 68.5% is given to standardised test result weighting in numeracy and literacy only from second class upwards. At the junior end of the school there is no oversight over the needs. They are coming in all of the time and are increasingly more complex, but they do not exist in terms of being visible to the Department of education. That is where we want to be able to input that. As well, misaligned and alignment is being used a lot today-----

What would that look like? Would that be an annual basis or-----

Yes, absolutely. I suggest the primary online database, POD, which already exists, but it is whatever system the Department would like to use to allow it to say a pupil has an identified educational need. We are entrusted by the NCSE as the appropriate person to identify educational needs for the purpose of assessment of need. Therefore, we are doing this all of the time. We identify what child has an identified educational need, whether they have had a diagnosis or not and what child has care needs necessitating SNA support. That, for every pupil, would give a much more complete picture of what is happening and would capture the change that has come in. I would like members of the committee to remember that while huge investment has been made in special education, it coincided with historically high levels of demographic in primary school. That is now moving on to second level. If we had this streamlined through the POD, that information would automatically go to second level. We have a passport system at the moment but things fall through the cracks. If that were streamlined, the Department would have oversight on where resources need to move to and second level would have all of the information around the transfer of children from primary to second level.

I thank the witnesses for being here. I do not know how they feel but I feel exhausted after hearing the six statements because there is so much in there. Pretty much all of the commentary is the same right across all of the statements in terms of school needs. This may be a question I could ask witnesses and I am sure the answers would be the same. In terms of fixing the issues that were presented today, I imagine it is down to financial resources because if the financial resources were there, we would be able to put the human resources in place. When we are having these discussions, it is like we almost started a couple of months ago to implement all these programmes because we have had repeated dialogue and conversations here around inclusivity, special education and equity. You get the sense there will be no need for us to have this debate again because it is going to get fixed, but I have a suspicion that we will be hearing this again.

It really behoves us as a committee to do whatever we can in progressing the issues raised today. Nothing galls me more than having to repeat the dose again and again when we should know, after hearing everything, the issues that are challenging the witnesses. If it is financial resources, we have an increasing population. There is no doubt about that. Over the last ten years our population just exploded. Therein lies some of the problems witnesses have encountered because there are more demands on a system that was probably a little antiquated and needed more investment and, all of a sudden, we find ourselves firefighting now. Therein lies the problem.

I am one of those, no more than previous speakers, who visits schools intermittently to get a better feel for what the issues are and what the teaching staff are confronted with on a daily basis. It is a very different scenario when you are there and looking at it than thinking from reading a report you know it all. I really encourage those people who run the Departments to go out, take a look and get a better understanding. Things are very different on the ground.

There was a lot of reference today to inclusivity, togetherness, a sense of community and, of course, equity. Do witnesses think the Irish education system values the importance of inclusive education as part of that community of learning?

The answer to that is "Yes". I want to come back to the point the Deputy made about finances. The recent report that alleged the Department of education overspent its budget is totally incorrect. The Deputy alluded to it being demand-led. It is demand-led. We have the highest number of students ever in the system. It is clear to anybody who works in education that we have been wilfully and systematically underfunded for many years and that is why we are where we are. The international comparators back that up. It is not coming from the Department of education. It is those holding the purse strings that are hamstringing the Department of education.

We work closely with Department of education officials. They are working towards the same aim we are but they will openly say they cannot do this or that because the shackles are on them from another Department that will not approve spending. There are currently positions within the system that cannot be filled and there is a big danger that those decisions that have been made for financial reasons are impacting on students in schools and will continue to impact negatively on students. To be able to remove those shackles, and to have an understanding of how the system works and the demand-led needs for it is essential, and that is a Government decision. That is essential to allowing schools to deliver for the students who arrive in their schools.

I have only 55 seconds left. I have an interest in understanding a little bit about the RISE concept. Ms Kelly spoke about that.

No, it was not me.

It was me.

Does Dr. Fitzgerald think that is something that could be rolled out nationally?

I think so, yes. When we talk about resourcing, we have to consider the right resourcing because it is not just about throwing more money at it. It is about making sure of the capacity of those within the system, and that they are able to respond, have the expertise, the support and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues. We need to build the leadership and all of that. That is what the RISE strategy is about. If we look at what the OECD says about Irish policymaking in education, it says we are the best in the world because we engage in fantastic consultation, we use research to underpin all of the policies and that they are excellent. It is the implementation gap that is the problem. If we look at the middle layer or that mesosystem layer, because we have a centralised government, except for the ETBs which are regionalised, it is about that local level, regionalised, context-specific support through communities of practice that RISE is. It is an architecture that supports scalable, in-context, professional learning development right across school leaders down to SNAs, subject teachers and the whole school community. I do think it is a scalable model. We had a very small-scale pilot with some Joint Managerial Body, JMB, and Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools, ACCS, schools this year. However, there is an infrastructure gap there in that the ETBs are regionalised but all other schools are not regionalised. We can tap into existing communities of practice and networks there but it would require some structural redesign.

I thank the witnesses for all their opening statements. As the previous speaker said, there was a lot of information and even from the questions that have been asked already, there are so many different areas we could all go chasing down.

I will go back to Mr. Crone, who cited and spoke to one of the previous speakers about the national framework for learning that covers the full spectrum of training needs. Who should be responsible for this? Is it the Department of Education and Youth or the Department of further and higher education? Is there merit in considering whether mandatory postgraduate qualifications should be mandatory for SETs, such as guidance councillors, for instance?

Do they see merit in exploring the role of teaching assistants, as in the UK model, for future care development of SNAs? There is a lot it in that.

There is a lot in it. The ideal scenario is that there would be mandatory qualifications because we want our people who are dealing with the students to have the qualifications and the experiences. However, we are putting it together with matchsticks and twine. To do that now would mean we would have nobody teaching in our special classes or in special education teaching, SET, or very few at least. We need to move towards that. That is why we think there should be a national framework. It is whole system-led. The Department and the National Council for Special Education have a leadership role. They can bring in the stakeholder, the higher education institutes and all that to put in place the structures - I include Oide in that - so there are initial qualifications, postgraduate qualifications, in-service training and proper collaborative networks.

I am not convinced of the teaching assistant concept, having been in a number of schools in the UK. We have a different model here. A lot of the SETs are moving towards team teaching and when that works it is very effective with the SNA supporting the care needs of the students to help them access the curriculum. The people who are responsible for it is everybody within the system but it needs to be valued at the top level. It needs to be valued and funded and the value in it seen. I think Dr. Fitzgerald mentioned we cannot just throw good money after bad. They are not her words but we need to have a proper framework to ensure when we are investing we are getting the impact.

There is already fantastic training there, but it is hard to access. For example, NEPS has a fabulous suite of measures but there are five-hour training sessions here and there in teachers' own time. Then there are national frameworks like the NCSE's Relate document or the Department's Understanding Behaviours of Concern and Responding to Crisis Situations. Schools have not received training on these. It was rolled out initially to special schools but not all of them have got that training and certainly mainstream schools with special classes or otherwise have not accessed it. There is really good training there, but is about building capacity and giving us the time. Training and capacity are interconnected but they are not the same thing. A highly-trained teacher and SNA still need the time to implement the training. I do not know how that can be looked at because the wider context is really important. We are rolling out a new curriculum now. There are foreclosures next year for this new curriculum but is the curriculum roll-out going to be very successful if you are implementing it in a context where inclusive education is really lovely and aspirational but the implementation and the operational realities are hard?

It is a repeated theme we get across a lot of interactions on this committee. Did you want to come in there, Ms Jackson?

Yes. I agree with Mr. Crone and Ms Dunne. It is really important that education continues for all teachers, including SETs and teachers who have a particular responsibility for students with the more complex needs. That is an issue in special classes and particular focused training is needed there. I also believe subject-based teachers in mainstream classes have these students within their classes and they need to understand their needs before they can include and differentiate for those students to give them a meaningful access to their education. I mentioned before I feel a certified, built-on model might be useful within the system as well in order that teachers can do courses, perhaps in their own time, which would be certified and would maybe ultimately have a qualification in the area of additional educational needs.

If I can jump in there as well, when you look at the European agency report on the roadmap for inclusive education and the NCSE paper on an inclusive education system from 2024, one of the recommendations there was to build the profession, to build the SETs but also to build the inclusion framework similar to what they have in Scotland where there is a collective mapping with HEIs - providers of initial teacher education - to look at teacher education right through from the initial stage to in-service and who is doing what to map it. I would be cautious about mandating qualifications in special education because it is hard to get these teachers. However, the EASNIE report recommends incentivising them and we used to have the special education grant or they used to get the allowance, but that is gone.

We might come back to this but I have to be fair to the other members and cut myself off as well.

I thank the witnesses for their opening statements. I welcome that they all say inclusion is a whole-school initiative. For too long it was just left to the SET, the SNA and special educational needs co-ordinator, SENCO, to arrange it. I worked in a school for many years and was a SENCO for a while and it was just left to a small cohort. There also was a lack of interest among some teachers in trying to be inclusive in the classroom and trying to differentiate the work, but fortunately it was only a very small number. I am aware initial teacher training now includes doing part of the training in a special setting, which is welcome, and the witnesses all identified training as something that is needed across the board not just as part of initial teacher training but CPD and ongoing training as well.

The witnesses have talked about sufficient allocation. The NCSE operated a notify system last year that was supposed to identify students who required a particular school placement and I think it ended having more to deal with than it anticipated initially. Some of that was from students not being in the appropriate school setting. They be in a school setting but not the appropriate one. I often hear from principals who apply for either SET or SNA allocation and do not get what they require. Then there is a review process and you are always told by the NCSE to engage in that review process. What is the witnesses' opinion of the review process because anyone I talk to finds it really frustrating and a lot of the time they do not end up getting any additional allocation? Have the witnesses seen any improvement in that and how it is operating? There is a lot of paperwork, often at the last minute. Principals are trying to plan the enrolment for September and they do not know if they can enrol children with additional needs, especially if their needs are complex, without knowing they have the required SNA and SET allocation, and it is often left very late. Have the witnesses found any improvement in that and how it is working?

I would love to say there has but really there has not been. That is the point I have been trying to make about how responsiveness needs to grow alongside inclusive education to increase capacity. This is not to be critical of the NCSE whatsoever but in its annual report are statistics on the success rate in appeals. As a principal I can tell the Senator it takes a very long time to put an appeal together and you would not be doing that if you did not need the supports to help the child. There is a roughly 10% success rate according to the NCSE's annual report and it would be the same for the SNA appeals. As I said, nobody would be going through that process if you did not need the supports. At the end of that there is still a child, or several children, in your school who need that support. You then have to become a gatekeeper for care, essentially. You have to decide who you prioritise to get the support and inevitably who does not get that support. That damages relationships with families and trust in the system as well. I definitely think accurate data underpins all of this. To address a problem you have to identify it and quantify it. The data is there and it can lead to more responsive decision-making, which can increase our capacity in schools and lead to better outcomes for children.

On that as well, there definitely is a need. We know already there is a gap of at least 5% between what we should be allocated and what we are actually allocated. Moreover, there are further gaps all through the system but we still are being controlled by a budget and once our level of need is predetermined by a budget, it cannot reflect our real level of need.

As other people have said, we know the level of need in our school. It is trust. That is what we are really looking for. We are looking for people to trust us in our professional judgments. As Ms Dunne has said, nobody is going to go through that appeals process, believe me, unless they really need that in their school. We are proposing that some kind of contingency is built into our allocation. As happens in most schools, the school year can present emerging needs and situations that may change during any school year. We cannot wait six or nine months to give the support to that child who needs it. We need to be able to give that support quickly. What happens in reality is that we take the support from another child to give to the person with more need. This is not inclusion and it is not helping the other child. What we need is a more flexible and fluid way of allocating our resources so that when new need emerges we have the ability to say "We can address that now", instead of us trawling for hours and days on laptops and waiting six months for 10% of us to be told "Yes, you get an increase in your allocation".

The witnesses say they have the data in their schools.

We have all the data.

I presume that would not be difficult to share. I am just thinking of a pod system where we have to put the students that are enrolled there or something like that. Is it some sort of system?

Absolutely we have no difficulty to share. In all schools we prepare a document showing where all our children are in the continuum of support and all of those children have support files so we can see clearly what the need is within our schools. This 25% that we are currently being based on is purely on literacy and numeracy results for three class groupings. That is not a reflection of what is happening in a school. That is three classes on a particular day in May in a particular year.

Yes.

That is outdated.

The National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, was mentioned as I was coming in. That is another aspect that is under resourced in our schools I presume.

Very much so. NEPS is completely under resourced.

It is a really important resource but it is not there.

I thank all the witnesses for being here. I just want to preface my remarks by apologising. Almost as soon as you had taken your seats I had to head off but it is the nature of the place we inhabit here that we are pulled in several directions at once, and just like teachers we have to learn to multitask here as well.

I am sorry for all the stuff that was in the initial statements but I will try and keep my questions brief and the witnesses might be able to throw some light on them.

The first thing that I picked up on when I returned was a very worrying disclosure relating to the transference of data from schools to the Department and the reporting of complex needs etc. As a former teacher and principal myself I wonder where are the inspectorate now in relation to this. It was my experience as a teacher that when things were going well in the school you could have the inspector in twice a month for coffee and biscuits but when you have a problem it is very hard to get them. I am just wondering does this still pertain in schools? No? Ms. Dunne is shaking her head. How then do they work in this regard? Do they not act as conduits?

Not in my experience. No. Our inspector is there if I want to contact her but I would only see a school inspector for an incidental inspection, a planned whole school evaluation or a subject inspection.

Is it not part of their role to furnish the Department with facts and figures?

No. It is not their remit. That would be to incur resources and they have been very clear on that. It is not their role to allocate resources or to encourage the allocation of resources.

Okay. That is very interesting. I think it was Ms Dunne who mentioned changing needs. Can Ms Dunne give me a layman's example of changing needs?

The data the Department has are proxy indicators based on historical data or standardised test results for limited classes. The allocations, for example for special education teachers, SET, have rolled over or have been largely frozen for the last six to eight years. I still have the same SET allocation in the school I work in that I had back in 2018 but the profile has completely changed. The Department does not have oversight of that information but it could easily have. That is what I am trying to say. I am not saying the old model was a better model, it was not, but at least you could apply for a child and get specific hours. I can attest that in my own situation, were we under the old model we would have at least 30 additional hours offset now because the needs have changed and evolved so much in our school. There are children with autism, ADHD, hearing loss vision loss, emotional and social challenges and so on. That is not reflected in standardised test results for numeracy and literacy. That is what I mean by changing needs.

The gentleman from the Joint Managerial Body mentioned an aspiration to have a deputy principal appointed for every 300 students. Has the JMB costed that?

We have costed that and submitted this in our pre-budget submission for 2027. There is a full costing-----

Would Mr. Keher like to share it with us?

I do not have the figures right in front of me now but I certainly think in terms of the overall investment of education it is a very modest proposal. It is something that can easily be funded within the system. In terms of the-----

Looking at it from our side of the fence, and I have had long experience from the witnesses' side of the fence, the point is that all of these are modest investments but when we aggregate a growing population all together the education budget has astronomically exploded over the last while and it is in trouble, as the witnesses know.

I will just give the Senator an example of that and put it into fairly strong numbers. Our SNA cohort within the profession has grown over the last 20 years. We now have in the region of 25,000 special needs assistants in the country. In the period of growth over the last 30 years, going from virtually no SNAs in the system to 25,000 SNAs in the system, zero management resources were put in place to support that. Imagine if the committee was speaking to the Garda Commissioner and the commissioner was told that with 15,000 gardaí in the system the management resources for the Garda were going to be stripped away entirely or that the force was going to be doubled but the number of management positions would not increase. That is how stark it is for schools. A whole new profession has been created and is doing fantastic work within our schools but schools with a large SNA workforce get no recognition for that. There was an earlier comment about the change in culture within our schools. This has brought with it a huge growth in complexity that is not served by the current management structure within our schools-----

Can I interrupt Mr. Keher there? I want to get maybe one or two of the witnesses to make an observation on this and the Leas-Chathaoirleach might give me an extra 30 seconds or a minute.

Some of us are waiting two hours here and have other stuff, but yes, go on.

I thank the Chair. I would like to know observations on this. We see student teachers coming into our classrooms and somebody would say to you in the staff room "God almighty that girl, or that fellow, is a natural for special education," and to keep an eye on him or her when they come out of wherever. There is this whole idea of somebody who is cut out for special education. Does that still apply? Have the witnesses noticed that there is an incidence of more rapid burnout in special education teachers over the last while?

Short answers if you could.

It is an extremely challenging environment. As mentioned earlier, there is a challenge in recruiting teachers to take on the role. The co-ordination team for special educational needs within our schools is grossly under resourced. That puts huge pressures on those who are taking on specialised teaching roles within the school. There is pressure on the mainstream as well.

I just want to ask about working with SNAs in the schools. Teachers are one thing, and I would have loads of things to say on that, but the fact is that SNAs rejected the ballot last night. I put up a post and asked people for the reasons.

Many of them relate to the Department, but I want to state some of the things that they said and ask the witnesses to comment on them with regard to working in the schools.

That came up yesterday, Deputy. We have to give time for engagement to happen on that. We said to members earlier that if there were issues they wished to bring up in the private session, in any other business, we could do that. Those questions might be more useful for the Minister when the Minister comes in.

This is about working with principals in schools. I will ask-----

Just in relation to the vote question, the Deputy might-----

-----because we have all the principals' forums here. One of the reasons for rejecting was the 72 hours of working for free, as SNAs would have put it. Some of the comments that SNAs made, though I am not suggesting this relates to anyone here but in general, were that they felt that this was abused by school management and by principals. They had other issues relating to career advancement and lack of professional recognition of their actual qualifications. Will the witnesses comment on work in June in post-primary schools, which was raised? Working longer hours in post-primary schools but being paid the same as primary was another.

A key issue cited by many people in the comments was the belief that this contract left them open to being used and abused in schools, that they could be asked to take on extracurricular work as a show of goodwill. Many people commented that this would not be asked of male-dominated workforces, and that it always seems to happen in the so-called caring professions, female-dominated workforces that are asked to do these sorts of things. People sign contracts where they leave themselves open to being asked to do something that they may not really want to do or have the time to do. Another issue arose which is not strictly the witnesses' role, but have they ever seen catheterisation being done in schools? Some student might need PEG or feed-tubing, which seems to be a role that would be much more for a medical professional. Those are some of the issues. I wanted to give the witnesses time to comment on them.

I have let the Deputy do that but she has mentioned a number of topics in her opening statement and I would like to keep it to those. Many of the points would be for the Department rather than the bodies.

Sorry, Chair, this is about working with principals in schools. The principals are there. This is about managing special education staff, SNAs and teachers. It is perfectly in order to ask.

I just think, with the timing of the vote yesterday, we do not want to prejudice anything. Some of the witnesses were probably working on their opening statements and might not have had a full opportunity to go through the response yesterday. There are many other topics we have to cover here. Could we keep it to those? I have given the Deputy the opportunity to make her point, but could we keep it to some of the things covered in the opening statements, if that is all right?

Are the SNAs not part of special education in schools, along with the principals managing that?

I think that would be for the Department.

No, it is not for the Department. It is the running of schools and how SNAs feel that they might potentially be asked to take on roles by school principals.

Is there another area of questioning the Deputy would like? She has a minute and a half.

No. I am asking this question and I do not see why it is excluded by the Leas-Chathaoirleach.

It is not. I am just saying that we had an opportunity in the private session if the Deputy wanted to raise this.

I did not have to raise it. I am raising it now.

We do not want to prejudice. We want to give time for the Department-----

We have sat through the most dopy questions about having tea and coffee with inspectors coming in here. This is about SNAs and how they feel that they are sometimes treated in schools. All the principals are here. If they do not want to answer, that is fine, but the Leas-Chathaoirleach should not be precluding them.

Mr. Keher mentioned earlier the scale of change that has happened in the last couple of years. We have gone from a sector with no representatives up to 25,000. He spoke about the scale of management change that has happened in that time too. We are trying to work through that. There will obviously have to be negotiations following from yesterday's decision, but there are many other points that would be more relevant, based on the opening statements.

So the Leas-Chathaoirleach is not letting them answer. Okay.

I have let the Deputy make the point, if that is all right.

It is obviously not all right.

The Deputy still has twenty seconds, if she would like-----

I asked my questions. If the Leas-Chathaoirleach is not allowing people to answer them, that is grand.

No problem, Deputy. Thank you very much.

The Leas-Chathaoirleach just should have told us that. I would not have sat here for two hours.

We had a private session earlier on and the Deputy could have raised that. She was not here.

I did not feel I needed to, Chair. The Chair is gatekeeping for whatever reason.

Thank you very much, Deputy.

I thank the witnesses for their opening statements. There was so much information. I appreciate the time that they took to work on that. I have a number of questions. We are addressing this topic as a committee because we feel there have been many challenges in the area of inclusive education, particularly over the last academic year. I will not go into it because I have said several times before what those challenges are. Is there a country that we should look to that does this really well, which resources it properly, which has trained staff correctly, and which gives autonomy to the schools to be able to allocate those resources on a needs-led basis, so that one sees what the child needs? Maybe there needs to be additional paperwork or supporting evidence. I do not mean that we do not believe, but rather it is evidence of what exactly a child needs. The witnesses would, as professionals, be able to deliver that on-site, and then have the multidisciplinary teams and highly-trained specialists that they spoke about there so that teachers can teach, specialists can specialise, and therapists can therapise. That is not even a word but the witnesses know what I mean. Everybody has their defined role.

We are having this conversation at this committee so that we can learn and try to inform what practice we would like to see in this country. We know there is great practice here, but we want it to be even better. Is anyone aware of who we should be looking to? I know students always say he or she is copying their work. I always say it is okay to copy and a compliment to copy others' work, because they are doing it well already. Where do the witnesses see that working well and how can we learn from those?

I will not mention a particular country. I will go to my utopia where if these three items could be progressed, we could really look forward. We would identify actual need and base our allocations on that, so that our SET allocations are actually based on what is happening in our schools.

So the real child and the real needs are-----

The reality that I will see when I go back into my school is that their needs will be met accordingly. To do that, we need to increase our SNA allocations, because they are not meeting the current need. The last wish would be, in this amazing country that we are going to move to, that we recognise and resource the leadership and co-ordination of special education properly and consistently through the establishment of a special educational needs co-ordinator, SENCO. At the moment in primary schools, 67% of people who are doing highly skilled, collaborative, quick decision-making, having to have so much knowledge, and leading teams, are people who have absolutely no leadership time.

Do they get paid for it?

It depends on whether they are post-holders. They could be, but in some cases they are not.

I am hearing that people often do these roles because they have gone off to upskill, to learn about things, and to become the person who is the expert on the team. That is really admirable but totally unrealistic for how we can maintain something. That is fine in a start-up phase. This education system is not a start-up phase. We are in the wanting to get better phase. That has to be someone who is paid, who is given the time and who has the skills for that.

A recognised role, because much of the time now, it is done on goodwill. We cannot run a system of special educational provision on goodwill.

From being around schools, I would see that people cannot be expected to do their full allocation of teaching and then do the other stuff too.

We cannot do everything brilliantly. Something is going to drop, and it might be the person who drops because they are exhausted. We need to be clear about that.

We have to be mindful that there are many large schools within our system - regular, large, mainstream post-primary schools - that could have between 100 and 150 students on their registers who need to be cared for. That cannot be attended to by one person on his or her own. There need to be co-ordination teams within our schools that are properly resourced, can work together, collaborate with the mainstream teachers within the school, and have senior management teams who have enough resources to devote time to leading those teams. We need to be careful. It is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all model.

After a rapid expansion in areas like, for example, our special classes, we need to attend to our mainstream schools and our mainstream provision. I am coming at that from an inclusion angle. If our students are to be truly included, they must feel included and that they belong in the mainstream class settings as well. We still have a pupil-teacher ratio of 19 to 1 and 23 to 1 in our fee charging schools. We cannot deliver a truly inclusive mainstream classroom with that level of resourcing. We must return at the very least to the pre-financial emergency measure level.

As someone who has been researching the SENCO role with colleagues in Mary Immaculate College and other institutions for the past decade or so, I agree with what Mr. Keher and what Ms Kelly said. We need to recognise a role because every team needs a leader that has the specialist knowledge and expertise. We also need to embed it in a distributed leadership team and, as Mr. Keher said, in some of our larger schools, there will be SETs, AENCOs or SENCOs for different year groups in post-primary, for example, who have posts of responsibility, so it will be more than one person. In a recent SENCO workload survey that I conducted with colleagues, we had about 10% representation in the survey from primary schools and about 20% from post-primary schools. We found that in the primary schools, more than 88% had a leadership role. They were either principals or deputy principals, simply because it is not recognised. However, at post-primary level, 72% had a leadership role for a SENCO, although there could have been things like year head added on to it. It is the distributed leadership piece, but it needs to be acknowledged as a role. They feel invisible in the system. They do not feel supported. They need specific professional learning around administration, data sharing, working with families and student support plans. The inspectorate report that came out a couple of weeks ago said that we need to do an enormous amount of work on student support planning.

Can I come back to Deputy Cummins first question?

I wondered if any was going to answer it. The witnesses are like politicians. No one answered the question.

If Dr. Fitzgerald could do so quickly, please.

Okay. Without sounding flippant, I would say that other countries look to Ireland because there is an enormous amount of really good practice being done here. We said at the beginning that in 2017, we moved to a needs-based system in our mainstream schools. That has represented an enormous change in how we work, view and understand things. That can take up to 15 years to bed in. I also acknowledge the policies and guidelines being developed through the inspectorate, the NCSE and the Department. The policy intention is really solid. We are just in a transition phase of embedding against a backdrop of Covid-19 and the enormous increase in the complexity of needs in students. We need to trust in the policy development as it is going rather than policy borrowing from others. Yes, there are examples in different countries, but the systems are different too. Portugal is an example. I know that Ms Jackson has been to other countries as part of her brief.

I thank Dr. Fitzgerald. She will have an opportunity to come back in again in few moments. We are going to a second round of questions for members who would like to go again. They have two minutes, and we hope to have time at the end for each of the witnesses to make round-up statements.

Dr. Fitzgerald's positivity is great. I hope all of that will be on the record because sometimes we give out about so much, but we are doing so much right as well. The Department gets over 1,000 representations a week. It is massive. I was out of the room for a few minutes because I had to take a call, so I apologise if this has been asked, but what is the quality of the student support plans that are in the witnesses' schools?

It varies, and they are necessary. They give an overall picture of the young person. I am the principal of a school that has between 1,300 and 1,400 students, so we do not have a student support file for every student. We could not possibly have that.

I appreciate that.

It is based on need and the continuum of support for few, all and many.

From listening to parents, it seems to be something that they would like to know about and be part of.

We go back to the time thing again and the SENCO piece. Who speaks to and liaises with the parents? Who speaks to the primary schools to do that important transition piece? We had a recent inspection and there were suggestions made. We thought we were doing really well, and we were, but it is about developing the whole picture and continually updating these. I know that subject teachers and SET teachers do a certain amount of that, but there is a piece that needs to be co-ordinated. The student voice needs to be in there. The parent voice needs to be in there. The need that emerged from the primary school needs to be included in that. It is a-----

It is a vital part.

I am going to be strict on time now.

Capital projects were mentioned in a couple, if not all, of the opening statements. St. Anne's Special School is a school in my constituency of Kildare South. Its situation is dire at the moment. It has got one toilet for 40 students. It has more than 12 wheelchair users who have no access to inclusive equipment at breaks. I have heard some of the parents' stories about their children and how they have regressed. It is heartbreaking and has been going on for years. The school has been stuck in the design stage, 2B, for a long time, and this has been going on for too long. What can be done within the schools building unit to reduce these delays? Is this as persistent at post-primary level as it is in primary?

It is a huge problem. We need to double, treble, quadruple our investment in capital infrastructure within our schools. As I mentioned earlier, schools are complex spaces, and they should be able to provide all of the facilities that are required by students. We have multiple schools that are on waiting lists for years and almost all of the additional accommodation provision applications include suites for special needs provision as well. These need to be progressed urgently in order that we can support our students within our schools.

In the past five to six years, the ETBs have started opening and taking responsibility for some of the special schools. The demand for capital funding and building is just off the charts. Does the Department have the capacity to be able to deal with that? Having funding is one thing, but it is the processing of all of that too. I am thinking about the ETB structure. If an ETB is opening a new special school, and there are four of them opening this year, is there an opportunity to devolve or decentralise the funding to take the heat off the Department and allow the ETBs to take ownership of those new capital projects?

Will Ms Kelly expand on her proposal that the role of the SENCO should be established on a statutory basis, and does she envisage that it would be a post of responsibility with an allowance associated with it?

If we are going to be serious about having the role of SENCO, then it would need to have an allowance. This is the situation that we are currently in where we have people completing this role out of goodwill and trying to ensure the needs of the children are met. However, as someone has already alluded to, with organising special education, people are meeting with parents and external agencies, working with the individual children, there are all the support plans, and they cannot just happen on an ad hoc basis. Yes, I do believe that it has to be a recognised role and should be part of the leadership team within the school, because if we are talking about inclusive schools, then surely the SENCO should be part of the leadership team in schools.

Mr. Crone said that schools are bridging a gap due to delays and shortages elsewhere in the system.

Do the witnesses see a need for a high-level task force for relevant senior Department and agency officials to ensure all services needed are delivered holistically and in an integrated way?

Yes, there needs to be an interdepartmental task force. The HSE, Department of education and NCSE have been working together on the roll-out of the therapeutic services pilot in special schools, which is essential and needs to be expedited in many ways. I have seen that working internationally and the impact it has. However the waiting lists, access to mental health supports and agencies like Jigsaw that are filling that gap for students need to be looked at in an interdepartmental way.

Perhaps that could be a recommendation from this committee to go into that report.

Absolutely.

I just have two points. I am hearing from everybody that support is needed for very particular types of schools, such as EBD schools, and the fact special schools are seen as primary needs to change. However, I am also concerned about reading classes. We have all these specialist classes for developmental language disorder and so on but it is so important we are able to resource them and to bring that out.

Most teachers are hopefully on holidays but some will be working because of summer provision. Hospital schools were mentioned, and I wanted to thank to the school staff in St. Raphael's. I never had the opportunity to say it. I have a child with a brain injury who is fine now, but that school was lovely when she was there. It is only when I think about it, they are never mentioned but these schools are such a fundamental support to the families and children in hospital. At that time, you think it is the worst place to be in but they have hardly been mentioned. I just wanted to thank them for the support they gave us when she was in there and all the staff

As Senator Nelson Murray said, there is so much negativity around it but there is also such positivity. There was a debate about whether teachers, SNAs and everybody should get presents at the end of the year, and I do not see why not, given the work they are doing, particularly in special education; it is very important. I just wanted to use my time to say thank you to all the school staff, particularly in inclusive education and wish them a lovely summer.

The Deputy has another 26 seconds, if she would like to continue.

I am all right with that. I nominate Deputy Ní Raghallaigh to have my time.

Because we have a few minutes left, and I know I have cut some people off at various different stages, we will now allow them two minutes to make one final point.

If they do not wish to do that, they can let me know. Mr. Crone might go first.

I am working off the top of my head but the aspiration in the action plan for education to deliver a world-class education system is very commendable. Our involvement with the European School Heads Association means we interact with school leader associations throughout Europe and, very often, they look to Ireland for good practice.

We have the foundations and building blocks, and we have what is needed; we are training teachers for the rest of the world. We are training high-quality teachers and exporting them to the Middle East, Australia and the UK, and we are coming to the end of our own teacher supply crisis because the peak in student numbers is this year. From this year on, we will see a decline in student numbers in post-primary.

What is missing in this country to drive it on is the adequate investment and an understanding at the highest level that education is demand-led. If you have more students, you have more teachers and more capitation. If you have more students with additional need, you need more supports. That cap is really impacting and hindering our system from delivering where we need to be and is the driver for the frustration within the system and among parents. History will not judge us well hen the long-term impact of that underinvestment in our students is seen.

My big call would be for Government to look at those artificial caps that are being put on the Department of education, and allow it to deliver.

The challenge is not whether school leaders are committed to inclusion; the challenge is ensuring the professional learning and system supports match the complexity of need presenting in our schools. Inclusion requires much more than policy intent; it requires the conditions that make inclusion possible.

Going back to my wishes, the first is a move to a needs-led resourcing model, ensuring the budgetary allocation for special education is aligned to the level of identified need resources rather than predetermined budget limits. The second is guaranteed timely allocations. We would ask that all SET and SNA allocation be released no later than February mid-term and a rapid response mechanism be introduced where needs emerge during the school year so that it is a flexible allocation. We need to increase SET and SNA allocations, as previously highlighted. We need to invest in behaviour and support services. We would like mandatory training for all relevant staff, to expand the behaviour support teams and multidisciplinary services and to ensure schools have timely access to specialist, emergency behavioural supports.

We ask that the role of a SENCO be established on a statutory basis, formally recognising this role in education policy to provide ring-fenced, non-teaching co-ordination time for the person to complete this role. We also ask for SENCOs to be included within school leadership structures and to fund professional learning and leadership development. Finally, we ask that leadership capacity be strengthened. As a teaching principal myself, we need to have time and space to ensure we can best lead inclusive schools. We ask for dedicated leadership time for our deputy principals, SENCOs and leadership teams to undertake this work.

I will get to my conclusion that I never got to, so I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach for that.

In conclusion, the reformed direction is positive. The task now is to build the coherence that will help the Department, NCSE and schools translate this rapid reform effort into effective practice on the ground. From an ETB perspective, that means recognising special schools as a distinct sector resourced appropriately; continuing the move towards needs-based provision, which might be a bumpy road but we will get there; building on an example like the RISE strategy as an enabling architecture for coherent, scalable and data informed inclusive school improvement; strengthening the preparation and continuous development of teachers, leaders, SETs, SNAs and SENCOs, deliberately formalising the SENCO role as part of that; supporting that mesosystem, that middle layer of implementation that connects the policy with the practice by investing in communities of practice; and protecting whole staff time for planning, implementation and review.

I thank the committee for the opportunity.

I thank the committee again for the opportunity to share our thoughts with members today.

JMB schools have really been at the heart of what I have seen over the course of my career, which is a radical transformation of our schools regarding culture and understanding of inclusive education. Our school leaders, teachers, SNAs and all our staff within our schools have done tremendous work to support that vision.

We need to keep moving forward in that regard. As I mentioned earlier, we need to look at our mainstream provision. We need to progressively restore our pupil-teacher ratio in our post-primary schools to 18:1 to ensure the mainstream experience for our students is the best it can be. We also need to have that ring-fenced SEN co-ordination time, and JMB has proposed that be based on a proportion of our SET allocation at 8.25%, which should be allocated to SET co-ordination teams so that they can do that work and facilitate that inclusion.

We need to expand our training opportunities, both the postgraduate special education programme and the ongoing professional learning of all our staff working with our special need students within our schools. We must radically improve teacher collaboration within our schools to make sure our students are getting the best experience, which is hugely important.

An issue we did not touch on too much today was an important barrier of inclusion for our students, which can arise from the absence of proper supports, such as guidance counselling, psychological supports and psychotherapeutic supports. We are way behind other OECD countries in that area.

That needs to be looked at. Senior leadership is very important. We believe senior leaders within our schools have the availability, agency and authority to deliver leadership on inclusive education in our schools. We see that as being extremely important, and our building infrastructure needs to give expression to it within our schools in order to facilitate a truly inclusive education system.

To answer Deputy Cummin's earlier question about our system and an ideal system; we have a very good system. It is growing disproportionately but having visited a number of countries one of the glaring differences and what stood out for me is when you walk into a school of 400 students. I visited three countries and every one of them has a resident psychologist and resident therapists. We really welcome the beginnings of the therapy systems in the schools. I know it has started in the special schools, but that will be a huge addition to schools.

Inclusive education is one of the defining challenges for Irish education. There have been significant resources invested, but their impact really depends on how effectively they are allocated, co-ordinated and supported in schools. That is the SENCO role my colleagues spoke about. We believe the next stage must move beyond allocation alone. It must provide: protected leadership capacity, and that includes the senior leaders in schools; strengthen teacher and SNA training; clarify roles; support special class provision; and ensure coherent planning in order that inclusion can be made real in every classroom and community.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to be here today. There are so many interconnected issues with inclusive education. We all share such a desire to push this forward and have it implemented as quickly as possible. Many of the issues I did not get to address are dealt with in the written submission we provided. I hope committee members will have an opportunity to look at it more closely, because there is operational evidence from school leaders who are implementing this on the ground that really explains the information gap we were trying to get across. There are some really practical suggestions on how inclusive education can be truly rolled out and supported in our schools. Supporting us to have increased capacity in our schools is a governance issue.

One issue I did not get to mention but would like to touch on is the fact that inter-agency collaboration really needs to be improved, because schools sit at the intersection of health, disability and education. We are seeing an increasing number of complex children with one piece that is not being mentioned anywhere, which is the medical piece. Schools are doing their very best. Every child is as welcome as the next, but the medical piece that is starting to come more and more into our schools is outside of even special education training. It can actually be quite dangerous. These children deserve access to education the same as every other child, but that is a specialist expertise far beyond what the majority of schools are able to manage. That training is not readily accessible. My sister works with adults with intellectual and physical disabilities. All of that training is there for her, namely crisis intervention training and people moving and handling training. That is not accessible unless boards of management privately outsource that training at great expense, which we do because we do everything we can to include every child. If I could mention that, the inter-agency collaboration and really specialist things when it comes to training.

If I can say one thing it would be: please, let us give the committee the data. We have the information. It is already there. Please let us feed that through a mechanism to the Department so there is full oversight of what is happening in our schools and so more responsive decisions can be made around allocations and the Department of education can really evaluate how inclusive education is going.

I thank Ms Dunne. Deputy O'Meara has come back to the meeting. We have a small amount of time left. I can allow two minutes, he must ensure that there is enough time for someone to answer him.

I am sorry. It is the nature of the mornings here sometimes in that you go out and are a bit later coming back in. I appreciate I was missing so this question could have been answered already but I felt it was important to ask. It was touched on but it relates to the compulsory course which is part of teacher education now in the SEN setting. I had submitted parliamentary questions on the topic previously before the information about how we are training teachers, while they are being trained as teachers, came out. How will we work for teachers who are already qualified and in that setting? I know there is CPD and all of the rest but how is it workable? What sort of hours will be needed? What courses will be needed for them? How will they fit it into their time? I know the witnesses have touched on that, but I felt it very important to ask the question to make it clear because that has to be key in what we will eventually report on. Would anyone like to jump in?

I mentioned in my briefing about communities of practice. Opportunities at school level for: whole-staff collective, collaborative and reflective, evaluation of provision; and identification of priority professional learning needs as a collective staff. That there would be an audit of the professional learning needs of all staff, some staff and a few staff, including school leaders, around that map to the school improvement plan more broadly so there is a strategic professional learning plan in place for a school. Through our RISE strategy, what we have done is helped schools to engage in that mapping process and data gathering from parents, students and staff to identify the strengths and needs in the school. Then what has happened is, as a result of that we have engaged with the likes of NEPS, Oide and NCSE to strategically target those identified needs that inform the school improvement plan or the DEIS plan in order that they are getting more bang for their buck, to go back to a comment Mr. Crone made. It is more targeted, collective professional learning that is context-specific. All of the literature around in-service professional learning and development speaks about the importance of localised, identified needs of leaders and school staff collectively if it is to become a whole-school endeavour within a school.

I know I am hogging the time, but the other point I have goes back to the point Ms Dunne made around the interprofessional, inter-agency collaboration. I argue that at the initial formation stage of your profession as a teacher, speech and language therapist or OT, we are now moving into the space of interprofessional education and collaboration within our schools. The identity of a speech and language therapist or a teacher is that they become an interdisciplinarian, not just a teacher in my classroom, but I am part of a collective inter-agency approach to supporting the needs of children with very complex needs.

On behalf of the committee, I thank all the witnesses for coming in and sharing their knowledge. The meeting was very beneficial and it will feed into our work on inclusive education.

There was an inference earlier that some members might have had to sit through two hours of not very useful information. That was no reflection on the witnesses. Their feedback is very important for formulating our work. I thank them very much. We have a very good committee here and there is great collaboration across all parties. It is appreciated. We are all trying to get to the same goal and the end of all of this and that is always reflected.

There was another inference about the schedule and having to sit through it. We have a very spare system on a weekly basis. If you are the first person to speak this week you will be the last person next week and it rolls through. All of the members are aware of that so there was no change today, just in case that was inferred either.

I thank the witnesses. At the next session on inclusive education in September, we will bring in the teaching colleges. A lot of the feedback today will be very useful when they are before us.