The Deputy will be aware that the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) has a statutory role under the Education of Persons with Special Educational Needs Act to provide me with policy advice in relation to matters concerning the education of persons with special educational needs. The NCSE published policy advice in 2013 which identified that the current model for allocating resource teachers to schools is potentially inequitable and recommended the development of a new allocation model.
In developing its policy advice the NCSE consulted widely with education partners, representatives from the school sector, parents, and disability representative bodies. The NCSE recommended that a new model be developed based on the profiled needs of each school, including consideration of Standardised Test performances in schools, and a schools social context, rather than primarily on school size and the diagnosed disability of individual children. It is intended that this new model will reduce the inequities in the current system, and also ensure that we are not unnecessarily labelling children from a young age in order to access resources.
Although there was widespread support for the implementation of the new model, there was not time to address all of the issues in relation to the proposed new model in time to allow for it to be implemented this year. I therefore established a pilot of the new model, which is currently underway in 47 schools, and which will run for the duration of the current school year. This pilot has been developed in order to test the model in a number of schools and to allow for the practical effect of the application of the new model in pilot schools to be gauged. It will also allow us to take into account the learning experiences of schools, principals, pupils and the views of parents over the course of the pilot, prior to the full implementation of the proposed new allocation model.
