The Cork CABAS Project owes its existence to parent power. A dozen determined parents, dissatisfied with the local provision for their autistic children, got together, trawled the Internet and discovered the comprehensive applied behaviour analysis (CABAS) method of teaching autistic children.

The parents secured space in a local school and recruited a US specialist in the CABAS methodology, then lobbied the Department of Education. Eventually, the Department agreed to fund the project for five years. The Department's initial sanction was for 12 children, but following a court ruling that an extra pupil be admitted, the Department funded six more places, according to the project director, Dr Olive Healy. Nonetheless, there are still over 20 children on the waiting list.

CABAS, which is based on ABA methods, was designed by Dr Douglas Greer, professor of educational psychology at Columbia University in New York. Greer says his system is the application of the science of behaviour analysis to the teaching of children, their parents, their teachers and supervisors.

"It's learner-driven and all instruction is individualised," Greer says. Students learn at their own pace and there is no coercion. Teaching and learning outcomes are closely monitored. CABAS was established in Cork in 1999 to teach autistic children aged between three and six years. According to Greer, there is a body of research which supports this sort of behavioural intervention: "In CABAS schools children learn between four and seven times more than they would if they were not in these programmes," he says.

Using the CABAS methods, he says, children can master tasks which would otherwise be beyond them: toilet-training, talking, reading, writing. With the appropriate intervention, up to 40 per cent of autistic children can enter mainstream schools, provided they have extra supports, he says.

Regular schools, Greer says, expect students to fit in with them. "We say the school should fit in with the student. I believe all children should be receiving individualised behavioural instruction. In the short term it will be costly, but in the long term it will pay dividends. People will be literate more quickly and it will ultimately cost less."

Pat Walsh, a parent of one of the Cork CABAS pupils, says his five year-old son's progress has been substantial. "Leo is less withdrawn, he has limited speech and understands a fair amount of what we say to him," he says. "He is beginning a reading programme, which he wouldn't have been able to do if he had been elsewhere."

Walsh recognises that his son will never be cured, but "compared to where he was going, he's at a different train station".