I thank the Ceann Comhairle for the opportunity to raise on the Adjournment the need for the Minister for Education and Science to provide classroom assistants to children with special needs in mainstream education.
In the Taoiseach's address to the Special Olympics, he stated: "Watching each of these athletes compete leaves many of us feeling personally humbled by their courage, their spirit and of course their sheer enjoyment in using the skills which they have learned and developed." This is the leader of a Government which does not want these same children and their peers to learn.
Despite the euphoria surrounding the Special Olympics, the allocation of special needs assistants in schools has been cut back. While the Minister for Education and Science was announcing €42 million for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, he was instructing his Department to make cutbacks in the most vulnerable area of education by reinterpreting the criteria for the allocation of special needs assistants.
Just three months after the outpouring of good will towards people with learning disabilities during the Special Olympics World Summer Games, a group of children with special needs is suffering due to cuts in the education budget. The recent junior certificate results of Patricia Carney, who has Down's syndrome, showed how well some children with special needs can do in the main stream education system. Children with Down's syndrome, given the opportunity, can reach their full potential.
Up to 10,000 students at primary and second level are awaiting news of their applications for special needs resources. Some are awaiting psychological assessments, including parents of autistic children who in recent weeks were forced to obtain the assessments themselves, such is the state of the service at present. Others who have had their needs assessed are now finding that the Department is not prepared to honour its results. Only 123 psychologists of the 184 promised under the National Educational Psychological Service have been employed. The recent report of the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General highlights the huge backlog of cases arising from the shortage of psychologists which has left thousands of children waiting for assessment.
The Department has decided to stop basing the allocation of resources on individual needs assessments. Instead, it intends to give schools a quota of special needs assistants, teachers and resource teachers. This would involve an annual allocation being made to schools based on the predicted incidence of special educational needs within different school populations.
The Minister for Education and Science's audit of special needs assistants in schools is nothing more than a whitewash for his incompetence and his Department's inability to deal with the huge volume of requests for special needs assistants. The focus needs to be on the needs of the child rather than other considerations. To apply a quota system will leave many children in the education system who require this type of special support without any service. This is evident in the speech and language therapy service and other services which are supposed to be provided. These include remedial and resource services which are being delivered on a quota basis, leaving some children high and dry with no service.
As other four and five year olds settle into their second month in school, many pupils with Down's syndrome are having to cope without a special needs assistant to help them in their new environment. A typical case is Michelle Cooney from County Longford. A psychological assessment carried out by the Midlands Health Board classified her as having mild to moderate Down's syndrome and stated she required a special needs assistant for 15 hours per week, with five hours of resource teaching. Instead, Michelle was granted 3.5 hours of resource teaching and no special needs assistant. Michelle is not able to function properly without this support. She is not able to cope in the playground and she needs help with things such as using the toilet so that she does not lock herself in, dresses herself properly afterwards, washes her hands and so forth. There are 26 other pupils in her class so the teacher cannot afford to leave them unattended and go with Michelle to the bathroom. As a result, the child is left sitting in the classroom because no support is provided.
Another child who is six years of age has nowhere to go to school. On the second week in September her parents were informed that a service would be provided. However, they have not yet been told when or where that will happen. There is not even a building to provide that service.
There is a crisis in this service. While the Minister has announced the provision of money for disadvantaged students in third level education, some of the most disadvantaged students in the education system are being ignored. Resources are being cut back and these children are not getting an equal opportunity to have the basic level of education to which everybody is entitled. The crazy aspect of this is that if an able bodied child were taken out of school because of a lack of resources, there would be a huge outcry from within the system and the Department would try to track down the parents concerned. However, since it is a disabled child nothing is being done. The Department is turning its back on these children.