Children with disabilities in Ireland hit by educational cuts

We all have equal right to education. In Ireland, the government decided to give schools less money to teach children with special needs.

From this September, schools in Ireland will only be given 90% of the teaching hours they will need to meet the independently assessed needs of pupils with disabilities. Inclusion Ireland opposes to the decision of the Department of Education and Skills, which can only downgrade the important role of education for children with disabilities.

If there are fields where investments could never be enough, education the basis for a healthy society to flourish. When it comes to children with disabilities, education becomes also the ticket for a more inclusive society, where everyone has equal rights to learn and progress. However, education is often one of the first fields which are influenced by states’ funding cuts.

A case like this has recently occurred in Ireland, where last June the Department of Education and Skills announced that from this September, schools will only be given 90% of the teaching hours they will need to meet the independently assessed needs of pupils with disabilities. Understanding the consequences of such decision to cutback teaching supports for children with disabilities, Inclusion Ireland expresses its absolute opposition to it. At the same time, it reminds that this is another cutback I the area of education supports for children with disabilities, which during the last 3 years includes:

• October 2008 - halting full rollout of Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act 2004, which was to be fully implemented by 2010. This Act was a major part of the Disability Strategy and included ‘individual education plans’, where child’s education needs would be assessed and a plan reviewed every year;

• February 2009 – it was announced that 128 special classes were to be cut from mainstream schools, which were deemed to no longer qualify for the teaching posts allocated to them. 534 pupils were enrolled in these classes. Following appeals 10 of these classes were reinstated, but 118 were still cut;

• April 2010 - a review of special needs assistants (SNAs) was published that showed there were 353 fewer SNAs in the education system. However, this is ‘whole-time equivalents’ and does not accurately reflect the number of children involved, i.e. many SNAs work part-time and many children only have an SNA for a few hours per week, so one whole-time equivalent may support several children;

Inclusion Ireland also underlines that these cuts are compounded by increasing class sizes, which also put children with a disability at a disadvantage, while it continues to raise serious concerns with the lack of an independent appeals system in the area of special needs education. “While the Government has changed in the midst of these cuts, this means little to those children with disabilities who need additional supports or to their parents who can see their children regressing”.

Source: Inclusion Ireland