Paul Murphy accuses State of failing children with special needs

The context of this debate is the fact confirmed by the Ombudsman for Children that the State is failing children with special education. That is the Government that is failing children with special needs. That is the Department of Education that is failing children with special needs. And it is an absolute scandal. Obviously the children that are being failed the most are still the over 100 children who do not have appropriate school places for September. We are now on the 1st of July, simply a small matter of months away. But the State is failing many more children with special needs than that. In reality, in terms of what should be done, the State is failing the literally thousands of children who have to go to school outside of their local community on a daily basis. Every single day in Dublin, for example, taxis crisscross each other across the city bringing children to their schools. It is an absolute scandal. This Government has responsibility for it, but also, of course, previous Governments. The bottom line point should be that all schools in the State that receive State funding should have to provide for the education of all children. With additional, with special needs, all children should be served by their local, publicly funded school. Where the resources are provided, there should be no basis for that not to happen. No situation where there is requests or whatever. It is a basic thing that schools provide education for children in their local area, including children with special needs, which means resourcing special classes. I do want to pay tribute to the campaigners, the parents, the many different groups of activists who have been fighting for the rights of their children. I do think it is part of why we are having the debate today that the Government feels under pressure on this issue. Like, right across the country, hundreds of parents have attended meetings about the needs of their children and have spoken out very powerfully about the crisis that they face. And, you know, you have to remember these are parents who are fighting for their children's rights on a day to day basis. They are not just fighting in terms of the Department of Education and schooling, they are also fighting in terms of the HSC, getting necessary therapy and so on. And, you know, often their lives are difficult enough without taking time to go out and join protests outside the Dáil or at the GPO or to go to local public meetings. But they do so because they are determined to fight that their children get the education and the health care that they deserve. And I do think they have created an environment whereby this has become a major political issue and the Government has been under pressure. I do think it is worth tracing back the pretty inglorious recent history of how the Government has attempted to deal with this scandal in the last couple of months. You just have to go back to May when Minister Madigan announced, quote, that the Government were considering establishing special education need centres as an emergency response to the shortage of school places for children with special educational needs. Obviously that went down very badly, understandably, with parents, with activist groups, with organisations like As I Am, Inclusion Ireland, because they rightly said this is a very bad proposal to effectively warehouse children with special needs separate from our schools. And goes against the idea of mainstreaming and integration and so on that we want to have. Inclusion Ireland responded that this emergency plan seems like ten steps backwards on the path to inclusive education. Inclusion Ireland was not contacted or consulted in any way about these measures. As I Am said, the lack of appropriate school placements is due in part due to the culmination of a lack of forward planning, forward thinking and coordination by a number of key stakeholders. That proposal appears, thankfully, to have been dropped. But I think it is difficult to see what happened at the weekend in terms of the naming of schools, not in that context. That growing pressure from below from parents and activists and kids who have simply had enough or demanding appropriate education. The government or the minister having come forward with a proposal that was a very poor proposal that was shot down very quickly. And then what seems to me have been an attempt to effectively punch downwards at schools, at principals, at teachers and distract from the government's responsibility here and the failures of the government. And so that led us to the situation over the weekend of the naming of four schools, all DASH schools, I have to note. And claiming, quote, that the decision to name the schools had been made because they were, quote, not engaging at all with the department and were, quote, just ignoring correspondence. And that wasn't true. And that wasn't true. It was not true what was stated by the minister. And one school that we've been in touch with, one of the four, say that they have a paper trail going back to October of 2021 of engagements with NCSE officials. And they say that the last discussion with the officials on the ground was about progressing the plans for special needs classes. And the officials are on the record as telling them that they were happy with the level of engagement on providing these classes. That school already provides a moderate needs class and is working towards a new building to provide more in September 2023. And then, with no warning, the minister names this and three other schools. The only explanation is that it was designed to distract from the government's and the minister's own failures. Notably then, when the evidence emerged in terms of the correspondence that had been responded to and the engagement that was taking place, the minister changed what she said. From her perspective, quote, they were ignoring the import of the correspondence. It's obviously quite different from, quote, just ignoring correspondence. Quite a different statement in reality. I did raise this yesterday in parliamentary questions with Minister Madigan. I gave her two opportunities in terms of questions I raised to apologise to the schools. The minister didn't take those. I just would encourage the minister in terms of putting this behind everybody and moving forward, hopefully on a more positive basis, to withdraw the false allegations, apologise to the schools, the principals and the teachers, and then proceed in terms of providing the necessary resources. Okay, in terms of the ongoing crisis that people face and that parents and their kids face, I'll give you just an example because it is a very, very real crisis. In Dublin 24, and I've raised this a couple of times now with the minister because it does seem to me to be striking. I mean, across the country we have a problem in terms of access to special education classes and getting places for kids. But it does seem to me you have a particular problem in terms of post-primary schools in Dublin 24, where the ratio of primary schools with special education classes to post-primary schools with special education classes is wildly less, like significantly less, wildly out of whack with the national ratio. So we have 17 primary schools offering special education classes, but only two from September offering only two schools with special education classes. When you look at the figures across the country, it's a ratio of 2.3, 2.4 to 1, whereas in Dublin 24, it is like a fraction of that. There is also a crisis, and this is obviously a nationwide issue in terms of an absence of summer programmes being run, which creates a real crisis for parents over the summer period, and then for those parents who can't therefore access in-school programmes, there is also an inability, for example the Taller Parents Autism Support Group, they surveyed their own members in terms of those who have managed to secure a home tutor, and about almost 50% have not yet been able to secure a home tutor, 35% say home tuition doesn't work for their child, and only one in five both say it worked for their child and were able to secure the home tutor. In terms of what needs to happen, we do need to have a centralised place whereby all the information is contained, a centralised database, all the needs of children for special education, to avoid a situation that months away from a new school year, we are saying, oh there is a crisis, still 100 children don't have special education classes. That simply shouldn't happen, it is very possible to plan to avoid that. We have the NCSE and the Department of Education which does not have access to a national database, in which they can project the numbers and location of children who will require special education facilities. It is not that such information is not available, clearly it exists in different discreet places, it is not that many of our public servants aren't working extremely hard with those children and the families to provide what they need, it is that the State has not bothered over years to think it necessary to compile such a database, so that we could know in advance the numbers and the needs facing schools each year instead of lurching from crisis to crisis. The final point is in terms of resources, which is what I think is at the bottom of a lot of this. The biggest reason why we have children with special education needs without access to education, many of the same children without access to the necessary healthcare, without access to other services, is years and years of government neglect. In the vast majority of cases in terms of dealing with education, schools are not to blame for the shortage of spaces, it is the Department of Education and the lack of government funding for the Department of Education which is responsible. It is an important context to this that Irish schools are overcrowded and underfunded. It has been mentioned already but when the NCSE or the Department of Education identifies a space for a special class, it may actually be a school library or a room that will be vacated by a teacher who will then operate from a corridor. Very few schools are sitting on suitable spaces and refusing to accommodate special classes. The four schools which were named and chained illustrate this, they already have special classes and are doing important work in providing inclusive education for their communities. So therefore what we need to have is the resources to ensure that parents and children get what they should be entitled to, properly planned, spacious, adequately kitted out classrooms. This is best done by allowing schools, teachers, principals, parents, students to discuss, to articulate their needs and then undertaking to meet those needs. In a timely, in a wholehearted way, not doing special education on a shoestring and not having this kind of diversionary approach of pointing to or attempting to blame particular schools for problems that are mostly the responsibility of central government. Today we are moving to begin the process of speeding up the Section 37A process. There are a lot of other things that I think need to be speeded up as well. We need to speed up the review process for schools that challenge inadequate staffing in their classrooms. We need to speed up access to assessment and therapies for children. More than 34,000 children were waiting over a year to access a community health service up to the end of September 2021. Can we please act to speed that up immediately? The services that children were waiting for spanned several disciplines, psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, ophthalmology, audiology, dietetics and CAMHS. Can we speed up access to them? Can we speed up the waiting lists for assessments, the waiting lists for therapies, the children who are waiting years for specialist services? Can we speed up the reorganisation of disability services for children? A reorganisation that currently has the look of simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We have a situation where a quarter of the staff positions on the new child disability network teams remain unfilled. Can we please speed up the filling of those? A recent Inclusion Ireland survey found that more than half of children with disabilities were not in receipt of any service or therapy. Can we please speed up dealing with that? Can we have an emergency session of the Dáil next Friday to deal with that? Finally, the OECD reports that Irish classrooms every single year are overcrowded and underfunded. The Government will say that we have more special education teachers than ever before, we have more SNAs than ever before, but the population in our schools is growing. The identification of children with special needs, the number of children with special needs is growing. We have a scandal as it currently stands, a complete failure of the State to provide for the education of children with special education needs. We need to address that. We need to know that that problem is not going to go away. It will get worse unless the key thing is done, which is to put the resources in place, to work with schools, to resource them, to ensure a suitable place for all young people and to ensure that everyone gets the education and the healthcare which they should be entitled to. Thanks.