Sir, – As a group of principals, with an established track record of inclusion in our schools, we wish to express our dissatisfaction and frustration with the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) in its performance of its statutory remit to provide schools with the necessary supports to educate children with special educational needs in mainstream primary schools.
In the 1990s, when the Department of Education made the decision to maximally include children with special educational needs in mainstream classes, school leaders were assured this would be supported so as to simultaneously meet the educational needs, both of the child with special needs and the needs of the other children in the classroom in which this child is welcome.
This is not happening.
The level of support the NCSE offers in its role as “gatekeeper” of these services is failing in both regards.
As principals, we are growing in frustration at the extent to which the NCSE’s support of schools is resulting in a compromise of the education of all children; those with, and those without, special educational needs.
This is not a criticism of individual special education needs officers, but of the policy stance of the NCSE.
We have a considerable list of grievances with the system – too long to list here – but foremost in our exasperation are:
Firstly, the NCSE’s interpretation on the role of the SNA fails to observe that the SNA should have an edu-care role. The current strict insistence that the SNA is limited to a quasi-nursing role is thoroughly unsuited to the schools’ wish to educate the child optimally through a teacher-SNA partnership that has, at its forefront, educational aims and objectives.
Secondly, there is the complete absence of the voice of the individual school principal who has the statutory obligation to all the children in the school to facilitate their education. Our obligations, expertise, experience and commitment is completely by-passed and limited to the role of “form-filler”.
Thirdly, there are parameters for adjudication that beggar belief but which are presented to us professional educators and school leaders as non-negotiable; such as the child with documented speech and language difficulties requiring a particular, and relatively high-intelligence, score in order to receive extra hours (the implication being the low-intelligence child is too low to be bothered with).
Or children with documented needs in the emotional behavioural disorder range requiring to be in therapeutical services, when in some geographical locations such services are not available to them.
Fourthly, the NCSE has now imposed deadlines which mean that children who are transferring from one school to another are being deprived of services for up to one year.
We feel entirely disempowered by the NCSE.
It is failing to support us in our wish and obligation to educate children with special education needs and also those other children with whom they are being co-educated in our classrooms. – Yours, etc, MARIA BOYNE Principal, Holywell ETNS , Swords, Co Dublin. (signed also by 15 Educate Together principals, for full list see irishtimes.com/opinion)