It is regrettable that the debate has come about in this manner. We have all expressed an opinion as to how valuable SNAs are to children and the school system. That has been worthy of recognition before today. I had the privilege in my career of working with many SNAs. I have seen children thrive through their intervention. If I go back to the start of my teaching career, I think there were around 1,000 SNAs in the system at that point, which was in the early part of the century. We have since seen a 2,000% increase in the number of SNAs. That is because we all want to see our schools be more inclusive and we all have a desire to see children attend the local national school and participate fully in the life of the school there. In recognising that, we have to recognise there has also been a dramatic change in the needs of children. If you talk to any junior infant teacher in particular, they will tell you the profile of children enrolling now is very different from what it was a decade ago. As we have heard from lots of Members, the SNA circular that defines the role must be changed to recognise that increasingly diverse range of children enrolling in our schools and who we want to see attend local mainstream national schools. We have seen that through the demand for other complementary services, such as speech and language therapy and CAMHS services, and in the demand for NEPS assessments. That changing demand has to be recognised by increasing the number of teachers and SNAs. We cannot forget that we made a commitment to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio to 19:1 over the lifetime of this Government. We need to make good on that because it will facilitate greater inclusion in our schools. There has been a lot of comment Circular 0030/2014. I referred to this in the Chamber previously. We received a lot of correspondence from schools last September and October about this. I do not know if it is a circular. It is the NCSE guidelines for the review of SNA allocation. One thing that concerns me is NCSE reviews are conducted on a whole-school basis, combining a review of all SNA posts in a school. That rightly causes concern.

Sentiment score: 0.12