Under the provisions of the Education Act 1998, the Board of Management is the body charged with the direct governance of a school. The welfare and safety of pupils is of paramount importance and schools have a duty of care to the pupils under their control. School management should, therefore, take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that no pupil or staff member is exposed to unacceptable risk.
It is important that the school management authorities would request parents to ensure that the school is made aware of any medical condition suffered by any pupil attending. Where the school is aware of potential difficulties that may arise as a consequence of a medical condition suffered by one or more pupils, it may be possible for the management authorities, working in conjunction with the parents, teachers, staff and children to put preventative measures in place to lessen the possibility of any difficulties arising or to ensure that, if a pupil suffers from an illness requiring medication, that appropriate treatment is available.
The administration of medicines in primary schools is the subject of an agreement between the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) and the organisations representing school management at primary level. While this agreement specifies that no teacher can be required to administer medicine or drugs to pupils, it also sets out procedures that must be followed where a teacher or teachers agree to do so.
Where a child requires adult assistance to administer medicine and where the extent of assistance required would overly disrupt normal teaching time, SNA support may be allocated for this purpose.
It is a matter for the Board of Management to ensure that SNAs are in a position to effectively meet the care needs of pupil/pupils for whom SNA support has been allocated in the school when appointing an SNA.
Where specific training is required, the Board of Management should liaise with the Health Service Executive (HSE) in order to ensure that the HSE provides guidance and training that enables the SNA to meet the care needs of the pupil in an appropriate manner. It is a matter for individual school authorities to make such arrangements locally.
It is my Department's experience that once the matter has been discussed in detail with the Board of Management and staff of a school, and once all parties are clear as to the procedures to be followed, arrangements can normally be made to administer the type of medicine which may be required.
In September 2016, I requested the NCSE to lead a comprehensive review of the Special Needs Assistant Scheme to identify and recommend how, in the future, the additional care needs of students, over and above those needs that could be reasonably expected to be managed by teaching staff, should be met and to identify and recommend the most appropriate form of support options to provide better outcomes for students with Special Educational Needs who have additional care needs, having regard to the significant amount of State investment in this area.
The administration of medication and other such issues in schools, has been raised with the NCSE as part of the consultation process of this review.
In May 2017 the NCSE brought forward a number of recommendations which were urgent, the first related to the need to set up a separate review group to identify options for an alternate and improved model for providing care supports and the second, proposed a separate review of provision for children with complex medical needs.
Separate Working Groups undertook that work over the months since the NCSEs recommendations and reports of those working groups have been finalised.
The full report of the SNA Comprehensive Review, which will be informed by the Report from the Working Group to consider an alternative model of SNA allocation and the working group on Nursing Supports for students with complex medical needs has now been submitted to my office and its contents are under consideration.
