Teaching Matters:At a principal teachers' meeting last week I casually asked a colleague, "How was your day?" By way of response she asked: "Have you ever had one of those days at work when you wonder why you even got out of bed today?"

Unprompted, she went on to explain that she wasn't talking about the sort of day that's filled with the usual challenges that working in a school brings. "I mean the type of day where you are left completely stunned and bewildered by the almost ingenious ability of the system to put up barriers when it comes to getting services for special-needs children," she said.

I have been around long enough to know that it has never been easy to prise open the purse of the Department of Education and Science to get additional resources for special-needs children. But, by the same token, experience has taught those of us of my vintage that if you stick with it, and have a genuine case, you can eventually break down those barriers and get the children what they need. Until last week!

That day, my colleague had a meeting with a Special Education Needs Organiser or Seno which convinced her that there must be someone, somewhere fiendishly designing ever-higher barriers around resources for special-needs children. Senos are supposed to organise resources for schools, but after her meeting my colleague is convinced that their real purpose is to make it impossible to get the necessary resources to support pupils in special schools. "It's not for nothing," she said, "that they are known in primary schools as 'Say Nos'."

There's a twin-track approach to the defence of the resources. The first one is to make demands that are outside the control of the school. A simple one is that anyone applying for extra resources must have an up-to-date psychological report. This would be fine if every school had a psychologist.

The National Educational Psychological Service was created to provide assessment reports to schools. But since it started it has been policy to exclude special schools from the service. No one told the health boards, which used to provide this service to special schools. They, and many other clinical agencies, withdrew the service they used to provide to schools. Isn't that a lovely sleight of hand - no supports without the expressed recommendation of a psychologist, but let's make sure they don't have the service of a psychologist.

But schools and teachers are not that easily defeated and for her meeting with the Seno, my colleague had the all-important psychological reports. And because one of the children concerned also had a problem with language she also had a speech and language therapy report ready. How she got them is not relevant to this sad tale, but suffice to say the taxpayer did not provide.

What she wanted in this case was funding for a software package to enable the child to communicate with others in the class. The reports from the psychologist and speech and language therapist outlined the child's difficulties in detail. But her meeting with the Seno left her in no doubt that because of the absence of the word "severe" in the report it is unlikely that they would ever get this valuable resource for the child.

In the case of another child, my colleague outlined how the provision of a special-needs assistant in the classroom would help a child to participate in classroom activities and cut down on the constant disruption to the teaching and learning for the whole class group. The Seno told her that despite the provision of reports confirming the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the child could not get a special-needs assistant unless he was also getting therapy from a health professional.

How can a school be expected to control the actions or services offered by others? So because the health service will not, cannot or does not think it necessary to provide a service, the school will not be able to offer any kind of support.

At this stage in our meeting my friend told me that she thought she was in the middle of some surreal nightmare.

But the second line of defence is a real beauty. I know that principal teachers regularly talk about increased workload and bureaucratic demands but wait for this. . . The Seno explained to her that in order to apply for a special-needs assistant for one child, she would have to examine the reports for every child in the class. The school would therefore have to provide a range of reports on all the children in that particular class. But before this could be done the school would have to get signed permission from all the parents and some of the professionals involved in writing the reports. That was before the photocopying marathon could begin. And that was for one child. She had three others on the agenda for the meeting.

I'm not angry with the Seno. Someone has clearly sent this individual out into the frontline to play this game with schools. It's the policymakers behind the scenes who I hold responsible for this farce.

I really think that they should all be sent back to school, even for a week, to face the reality of classroom life without the resources that they are so zealously protecting. Then they could see the anger that builds up in schools when the rules of the game are changed to disadvantage those children who are supposed to be given additional help. Then they could feel the frustration of principals when the services of others determine resource allocations to schools. And they could understand why my colleague wished that she had never got up that morning.

Valerie Monaghan is principal of Scoil Chiarán, Glasnevin, Dublin