I thank Sinn Féin for tabling this important motion. I pay tribute to the thousands of SNAs, teachers, parents, school principals and those in the broader school community who have forced the Government to back down on the attempt to cull SNA supports for schools and children with additional needs across the country. It was the groundswell against this move and the national outcry of thousands of people that got us to where we are now. However, our already stressed and strained school communities should not have had to do this. The roll-back of the move is absolutely welcome but it cannot be the end point. It must be the beginning of something new. It must, we would hope, be the beginning of a fundamental reassessment of our special education system, from the role of the SNA to how levels of need are determined and how SNA support is allocated within schools. I refer the Minister to Ciara Reilly's Substack page, as others have also done. Ms Reilly has written a series of excellent articles on how this debacle has unfolded. I will briefly refer to a couple of the points she made. The first is the issue with the SNA deployment toolkit. From what I can see, that is where all roads seem to lead in many respects. Under this mechanism, SNA support is allocated almost exclusively to children with the most significant primary care needs. The threshold for meeting those needs seems to be applied quite rigidly. The upshot is that children with perhaps less severe and often more behaviour-based needs can be excluded. However, those children, including children with sensory issues, attention issues and those who require emotional regulation, need and deserve SNA support too. Teachers who are already overburdened will be further strained without that support. Ultimately, this harms all students, be they children in mainstream classes, children in special classes or children in special schools, and their right to a decent education. We can debate technicalities and administrative matters concerning how we deploy SNAs but we cannot lose sight of the fact that beneath all of this is the well-being of children. The second key issue is the 2014 circular that defines the role of the SNA. It evolved the role into one that seems to be much more focused on caregiving than supporting access to education. This means SNA support is granted only in acute circumstances, where care needs are considered at the expense of educational needs. This sidelines an entire cohort of children with special educational needs who do not fit neatly into the criteria or tick a very specific box. The role of an SNA should fundamentally be about supporting a child's access to education. This may require some care-based responsibilities, but we cannot allow a situation to emerge where children who require additional support are denied it because they do not fit into the correct box.

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