On 18th January last, I announced that a new model for allocating Special Education Teaching Resources to mainstream primary and post primary schools will be introduced from September 2017.
The basic aim of this new model is to deliver better outcomes for children with special educational needs. Large amounts of research, analysis, consultation with service users and stakeholders, and piloting have gone in to the development of this model and all the evidence points to the fact that this new system will deliver better outcomes for children.
No school will lose supports as a result of the implementation of the new model. In addition, no school will receive an allocation, for the support of pupils with complex needs, less than the allocation they received to support such pupils during the 2016/17 school year. No allocation made for such pupils by the NCSE will be removed from schools as long as that pupil remains in the school.
I also announced that an additional 900 teaching posts will be provided to support the introduction of this new allocation model. The provision of an additional 900 teaching posts is a very significant investment in the provision of additional teaching support for pupils with special educational needs in our schools. This is additional to an increase of 41% in the number of resource teachers allocated to schools annually by the NCSE since 2011, when 5265 teachers were allocated, as opposed to provision for 7452 posts in the current school year.
The additional funding will provide additional supports to over 1000 schools who are identified as needing additional supports as a result of the new model. Supports for children with special educational needs is a huge priority for this Government. We currently spend €1.5billion, or one fifth of the total education budget, on supports for children with special educational needs.
The Deputy will be aware that the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) has a statutory role under Section 20 of the Education of Persons with Special Educational Needs (EPSEN) Act 2004 to advise me, as Minister for Education and Skills, in relation to matters relating to the education of children and others with disabilities.
In 2014 the NCSE published a Working Group Report “Delivery for Students with Special Educational Needs - a better and more equitable way” which recommended a new model for allocating resource teaching support to schools, based on the profiled needs of each school, rather than being primarily based on the diagnosed disability of individual children.
It proposed that the allocation of additional teaching supports to schools be in future based on two components:
School educational profile component; and
Baseline component provided to every mainstream school to support inclusion, prevention of learning difficulties and early intervention.
The working group selected three elements on which to establish a school’s educational profile, based on what each element contributes to building this profile:
1. Students with complex special educational needs.
2. Percentages of students performing below a certain threshold on standardised test results
3. Social context of school which includes gender, primary school location and educational disadvantage.
The NCSE working group report considered that standardised test data provides a broad and objective basis to establish differences between schools in levels of relative overall student educational achievement.
The report recommended that standardised test results should be used in building the educational profile of schools, as they link directly to the educational achievement of students in schools.
The use of standardised test scores will ensure that the school’s educational profile includes students with low achievement in literacy and numeracy including those students whose special educational needs affect their learning achievement levels.
The previous generalised allocation model, which was based primarily on school size, did not take account of the learning needs of pupils, or of the profile of pupils in the school.
It was for this reason that the NCSE recommended that a profiled allocation be made for schools, which included consideration of standardised test scores.
In calculating this element of schools’ educational profile an aggregate of primary school standardised test results over 2013/14 and 2014/15 has been used for the first phase of the introduction of the new allocation model.
For future re-profiling of the model, updated data will be used to create an aggregate of the school’s learning support needs, which will ensure that an accurate picture of a school's profile over a period of time is developed.
In order to ensure that schools are not penalised for improving performance generally, no resources provided to schools under the current model will be removed from the school on the introduction of the new model.
The use of standardised test data means that the school profile considers not just the number of pupils in the school, but also the learning needs of those pupils in that school who are performing at a level represented in the bottom 16% of the population, as evidenced by national attainment data.
In this context, schools with strong performance on standardised tests should have no concerns on the impact of this on their profiles. In calculating values for this component, no consideration is given to scores above Standard Ten scores 1 to 4. Effectively, values are only accorded to the 16% of students who would ordinarily fall within, or on the margins of, the learning support needs category.
It should also be noted that the consideration of standardised test data forms only one part of the special educational needs profiled allocation for schools and there will not therefore be an over reliance on standardised test scores.
A new Circular and Guidance will be issued to schools in the coming weeks which will provide details of how the scheme will operate while details of the allocations for each school will also be provided to schools
