There are two very important lessons that we have learnt from the SNA debacle over the past couple of weeks. The first is that the Government does not care about the most vulnerable and, left to its own devices, will abandon them. The second is that people power works because the Government is now promising an extra €19 million for SNAs. The Government is also saying that no school will lose SNAs next year. The only reason that happened was because of a groundswell of protest on the part of parents, SNAs and teachers. It did not happen because some kind of logical light bulb went off in the heads of those in government. It happened because the Government came under immense pressure. Acting together, school communities forced the Government into an embarrassing climb-down. The lesson in this regard that should ring out widely across the country on all sorts of issues is that people power works and that the Government can be defeated. Of course, it is true that what the Government has been forced to concede is nowhere near enough to guarantee every child their right to an education appropriate to their needs. That is why the protest outside the Dáil at 5 p.m. is going ahead. It is important that the protest does go ahead because, as the organisers say, an extended pause is not good enough. An SNA who has two autistic sons wrote to me last week. She stated: I wish some TDs could spend a day in a school and actually see what is going on. We would be classed as having a lot in our school and it’s nowhere near enough. The amount of children needing our supports is too much for us to deal with on good days. [...] The stress we face every day going to school is sometimes unbearable. Through no fault of their own, a lot of these kids just can’t cope because they are in the wrong setting. Myself and my colleagues are daily hit, kicked, bitten, called all sorts of names but we continue to go to work because along with these distressing behaviours we also witness moments of magic when a child will engage, will integrate, will give you a smile and some eye contact, will begin to form letters while writing after our hand has been over theirs for years. We are important. We are good at our jobs. We deserve better and more importantly these kids deserve better. Inclusion without support = abandonment. It is clear that the root cause of this is the failed approach of allocating SNAs on the basis of narrowly defined primary care needs. That is what needs to be stopped. Instead, the Department should trust schools and parents. They know what the needs are. The Department should start forward planning based on realistic demographic projections with spare capacity built into the system. We need significant and sustained multi-annual increases in funding to reduce class sizes, train thousands more special educational teachers and therapists and guarantee at least one SNA for every classroom. There is so much more that can be done but what we have learned is the Government will not do any of it unless it is forced and that is why people continue to mobilise and will be on the streets in a couple of hours' time.

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