I commend Deputy Quinlivan and the committee on producing a very good report. I have not read it all yet, but I have read a fair bit of it and it seems like an important piece of work. Well done to them all. I am not a member of the committee but it is an important issue. I have a particular reason I want to raise a specific issue with the Minister of State in relation to people's access to education and special needs assistance and I will get to it in a minute. The starting point of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the fact that equal access to education is a right for children regardless of disability or additional needs was brought into very sharp focus recently with the Government's move to reduce the number of special needs assistants in many schools and the explosion of anger from school communities that caused. The Government has responded to that explosion, but it highlights something that is terribly important, which is the need to listen to those who are impacted by our decisions and by whether the systems we have and the resources we allocate are adequate to actually ensure the quality we profess to try to achieve in terms of delivering equal access to education. What we learnt from school communities, parents, teachers and SNAs during the recent events is that the role of the SNA had massively evolved from when the 2014 circular, for example, was originally done up; that a sort of minimalist approach to the special needs resources that were needed for children was not adequate; that there had to be recognition of that evolution of the role of the SNA in providing social support, communication support and emotional support to children; and that a minimalist approach which led people to think they could reduce SNA support on spurious grounds failed to take on board the actual needs of children and the views and opinions of the SNAs, the parents and the school communities. It was a matter of listening to those directly affected. A "nothing about us without us" approach is terribly important in this regard. It is in that context that I want to highlight to the Minister of State - I do not know whether he got an email about this - the situation, which may be impacting more broadly than the particular example I have come across, of the allocation of SNAs to children under IPAS, which is a different system. The Government, in the context of the recent protests and so on, promised that there would be no reductions in SNA supports for schools in September, but that has not come to pass in the case of the provision of SNAs for children from IPAS accommodation. They are in the same schools as other children, but it is a different system for allocating special needs supports. I was not aware of that, but this is where you learn from people on the front line, in this case from Holy Family National School, in Monkstown Farm, in my area. The way SNAs are allocated is that for every 15 IPAS students the school has you get a half-time SNA, half a post, for 16 hours. If, however, the number of IPAS students drops below that number, you lose that. That is what has happened to Holy Family National School. This happens even if the number drops only temporarily. In the case of the Holy Family, the school informs me and has informed the Department that the number has briefly dropped below the threshold of 15 but that it will go back up above the threshold in September. In the meantime, however, the school has had the half an SNA post withdrawn and it simply cannot cope with the impact of that. It does seem crazy to have a cliff edge of that sort. If you have 15 students, you get half an SNA post, but if you have 14, you get none, so you just go over a cliff. Then the school has to pick up the slack, and that will impact everything else in the school. An injury to one is literally an injury to all, and that is not fair. I ask, on behalf of Holy Family National School, all the children involved - the IPAS children and all the other children - and the teachers who will be impacted as a result of that, for that to be addressed and for the schools, please, to be heard. It does speak more generally to something I think Simon Lewis said to me about the approach we have to have in ensuring inclusivity and in giving the necessary supports and resources to avoid a penny-pinching or box-ticking model that can end up not really doing justice to the actual human lived reality of children with disabilities or special needs. The way he put it, in literally one sentence, was that we have to trust schools, that we should just trust schools. There are so many buzzwords in all these documents, but I think that is what is referred to when we talk about rights-based and needs-based provision - that it is the actual needs that have to determine things, rather than ticking boxes or rationing resources, which is so often the case. That, I think, was at the back of the recent debacle in terms of the withdrawal of special needs supports for so many schools, causing panic and alarm in school communities across the country. We must recognise those on the front line: the parents, the teachers, the SNAs, the children themselves, the school communities. They can tell us what the needs are. They are the experts. They should be believed; they should not be distrusted. It should not be thought that they are trying to rip the Department off of resources. Their words should be accepted. That is not to say that very occasionally people might not look for things they do not need. By and large, however, people do not look for things they do not need, and there should not be an attitude at Department level that people are looking for things they do not deserve. It is when that attitude of gatekeeping comes in that we get problems. In my last minute and a half I wish to mention a couple of things. When will the pilot project on providing therapies in schools be expanded to all schools? From what I hear, it is a storming success, and how could it not be? How could providing OTs, speech and language therapists and psychologists in schools not be a good thing? We do not really need to pilot any more. It is working. Let us just do it and roll it out and have a plan to get all these speech and language therapists, psychologists and-----

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Excellent. Can we also, then, have psychology departments in post-primary schools? That would be the next thing, something that has happened in many other schools. We know mental health issues are huge in terms of special needs, neurodivergence and so on but also just generally for young people. There should be, as there are in many other countries, psychology departments in every single school. That should be an aspiration for us in every school. I agree with Deputy Toole's point about arts. When we talk about expanding the basic income for the arts scheme, we should develop a scheme to offer jobs to artists in every single school, whereby you get a decent, liveable income and you have time to practise your own art but also help bring art to children with special needs, disabilities and so on, and indeed to children generally in schools. That would be well worth investing in in every single school and would be an imperative to reach across the education system.

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