I thank the Deputy for the question. The Government is committed to the provision of additional special school places for children with more complex educational needs. Over 300 new special school places are being provided for in the coming school year, 2025-26. Five new special schools are being established in addition to 11 new special schools having opened over the past five years. Special school capacity is also being expanded in a number of special schools. Along with providing additional special school capacity, the Department and the National Council for Special Education are considering that it may be necessary to look at the profile of our existing special schools. It is not the intention to exclude children who require special school places from accessing certain special school settings, but instead to work to ensure children with complex educational needs can apply to their own local school. The Deputy will agree that situations are arising where children with additional needs are travelling past special schools in their locality to attend special schools farther away. This is not fair on children or their families. This is down to the fact that children cannot apply for admission to their local special school simply because they do not meet the narrow designation of that specific school. This needs to be addressed and the Department is looking to engage with stakeholders in that regard. This is not a new departure. The National Council for Special Education reports that over half of these mild general learning disability special schools have been diversified, which means children with more complex needs can enrol in their local special school. I thank the schools that have worked with us to broaden their designation. The Department will continue to support schools in this endeavour so that more special schools can better support children with complex needs in their local community. Approximately 30 of the 129 special schools were originally designated as schools for children with mild general learning disability. The establishment of these special schools predated the significant expansion of supports offered in mainstream schools through additional special education teachers and the resources of special needs assistants. I will come back in on that.
Sentiment score: 0.49
I take the point, but it is important that special schools, special classes and special places for children with additional needs are as local as possible to pupils' own communities. In various debates on special education, we constantly talk about people who are travelling long distances, be that in urban or rural Ireland, for those places. That is something we really are very serious about tackling. On students with mild general learning disabilities, the experience over the past 20 years regarding mainstreaming is that a lot of it has been very successful. Yes, there are children whose needs will not be met in mainstream schools and we want to ensure we have that for them. We want real engagement with stakeholders because many of the schools throughout the country, as the Deputy has mentioned, are doing extraordinary work. We want to continue that but we want serious engagement as well. It is also important that we accommodate children as locally as possible to their own community.
Sentiment score: 0.49
Most of the 30 mild general learning schools have worked extremely well with the National Council for Special Education over the past while to broaden their profile and to accept students with autism and more complex educational needs. Both the Minister, Deputy McEntee, and I have worked extraordinarily hard over the past number of months on making sure that we have a place for every child in September. That is a fundamental issue. We are trying to make sure that it is done early every year but in some of the information that we correlated over the past while, where there were some vacancies in some schools and children were travelling long distances away from those communities, if we are genuinely serious about making sure we have inclusivity, we have to tackle those issues and go under the bonnet to see what the challenges are and how we can make it more inclusive. I take the point on it but it is important we utilise every space available to make sure we have the most appropriate place for children. The schools have engaged. We will continue to engage with the stakeholders because we need everybody on board in relation to these projects.
Sentiment score: 0.43