Sir, – Concern is growing among parents and teachers about the newly published guidelines for the allocation of special needs assistants (SNAs) for children with special educational needs by the Department of Education. This will affect every child.
SNAs help children with special needs to attend school, to be integrated into mainstream education and minimise the possible disruption to the class and teachers. SNA support helps children with special needs to reach their maximum potential in life and enables fair access to education. SNAs help children with these special needs, calm them down, help with the toilet, meals, take them out when needed, and so on.
Class sizes have been increased already. It means more pressure on all schools. Now with the SNA cuts, teachers will have to spend more time and energy dealing with the day-to-day needs and developing the life skills of these children instead of teaching the curriculum.
If a child is overwhelmed in class or needs to be assisted in the toilet, it will be the teacher’s duty to deal with this, and now without the help of an SNA.
The SNAs are not a luxury – they are vital in helping the children to be educated and to integrate into our society successfully.
If children with special educational needs are to lose this essential support, then their education will be significantly restricted, the teacher and their classmates will be impacted, and they may eventually lose the opportunity to be fully integrated into our society and become independent adults. Inevitably these children will struggle every day in school.
This circular and the cutting of the resource hours may be the beginning of the end of inclusive education in Ireland.
By constantly cutting the available resources, the Department of Education is effectively pushing children with special needs out of mainstream education and into special schools. –Yours, etc,
VERONICA SURKOVA,
Oakton Park,
Ballybrack,
Co Dublin.