Claire Kerrane
Question:452. Deputy Claire Kerrane asked the Minister for Education the current special needs assistant and special education teacher to student ratio. [11525/21]
View answerWednesday, 3 March 2021
Questions (452)
Written answers
I wish to advise the Deputy that the provision of education for children with special needs is an ongoing priority for Government.
The Department of Education and Skills will spend approximately €2 Billion or over 20% of its total educational budget in 2021 on making additional provision for children with special educational needs next year.
The numbers of special education teachers and Special Needs Assistants are at unprecedented levels.
Over 13,600 Special Education Teaching posts are currently allocated to mainstream primary and post primary schools, which is an increase of over 39% since 2011, at which time 9,740 posts were allocated.
For 2021 over 18,000 SNAs will be available for allocation to schools which represents an increase of 70% since 2011, at which time 10,575 were provided.
DES Circular 007/2019 for primary schools and 008/2019 for post primary schools set out the details of the model for allocating special education teachers to schools.
The Special Education Teaching allocation provides a single unified allocation for special educational support teaching needs to each school, based on each school’s educational profile. This model has replaced the previous model of allocating resource teaching support and learning support to schools.
The Special Education Teacher allocation, allows schools to provide additional teaching support for all pupils who require such support in their schools and for schools to deploy resources based on each pupil’s individual learning needs.
It gives greater flexibility to schools as to how they can deploy their resources, to take account of the actual learning needs pupils have, as opposed to being guided by a particular diagnosis of disability, and schools are guided as to how they should make such allocation decisions.
The allocations are made for schools based on the profiled needs of schools, which takes account of:
1. A baseline component provided to every mainstream school, based on school enrolments, to support inclusion, prevention of learning difficulties and early intervention.
2. An allocation for students with complex special educational needs, as set out in Circulars 07 and 08 2019
2. An allocation which takes account of the learning needs that a school has, as evidenced by the number of students performing below a certain threshold on standardised test results
3. Account is also taken of the social context of school which includes gender, primary school location and educational disadvantage.
The allocations of special education teachers are therefore based on the profiled needs of schools, which includes a range of factors, as oppossed to being based on a pupil to SET teacher ratio.
Allocations of Special Needs Assistants are provided to schools, based on the assessed care needs of pupils, as set out in accordance with DES Circular 30/2014, and for the current 202/21 school year, in accordance with the criteria set out in DES Circular 30/2020.
The allocations for SNA support also, therefore, take account of the individual circumstances of schools, and are not based on an SNA to pupil ratio.