Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 1 October 2014
166. Deputy Jonathan O'Brien asked the Minister for Education and Skills the cost of reinstating the five hours of special needs assistant support received by children with special needs from the cut rate of three hours and 45 minutes; and the number of extra SNAs that would be needed in order to implement a policy of five hours of support. [37321/14]
View answer167. Deputy Jonathan O'Brien asked the Minister for Education and Skills the number of children accessing resource hours in schools; and the number of extra resource teachers that would be needed to ensure that all children accessing resource hours received the maximum of five hours of resource support. [37322/14]
View answerI propose to take Questions Nos. 166 and 167 together.
I wish to advise the Deputy that there has been no reduction to the amount of time which may be allocated to pupils in respect of Special Needs Assistant (SNA) support or any limitation on the amount of time that an SNA may spend with a child who has been granted access to SNA support by the NCSE. There has also not been any reduction to the overall number of SNA posts which may be allocated to schools. On the contrary, the number of posts which may be allocated to schools increased from 10,575 posts to 10,965 posts for 2014.
Once SNAs have been allocated to schools, the deployment of SNAs within schools is then a matter for the individual Principal/Board of Management. SNAs should be deployed by the school in a manner which best meets the care support requirements of the children enrolled in the school for whom SNA support has been allocated. It is a matter for schools to allocate support as required, and on the basis of individual need, which allows schools flexibility in how the SNA support is utilised.
The total number of Resource Teaching posts which the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) may allocate to schools to support children with special educational needs for the 2014/15 school year is presently set at 6,225 WTE posts.
This is more posts than has ever previously been made available to the NCSE to allocate to schools and shows that there not been a reduction to the overall number of posts being allocated to schools for resource teaching support. The figure of 6,225 posts 2014/15 should be compared with 5745 posts for 2013/14, and 5265 posts for the 2012/13 school year.
Over 35,000 pupils are being supported by resource teaching hours allocated to schools by the NCSE this year, while allocations are still being made to schools in respect of late applications.
No reduction was made to the amount of resource teaching time allocated to schools, per pupil for either the 2014/15 or the 2013/14 school year.
In order to provide an additional 15% allocation, to return the allocation rate for individual applications to the level which was in place at the 2010/11 year, based on the number of posts expected to be allocated to schools by the NCSE for the current school year, it is estimated that this would require an additional 1098 Resource teaching posts, at an initial teacher salary rate of €49.4m per year.
