Schools are at “breaking point” over the competing demands of parents and the Department of Education on providing for special educational needs, according to the main umbrella group for boards of management.
Publishing a survey of school managers today, the Joint Managerial Body (JMB) said the 15 per cent cut in supports since 2010 for pupils with special educational needs (SEN) was affecting the quality of education for all children.
The average loss per school in the survey was just under 17 resource teaching hours per week at a time when demand for services were growing, it said.
Ferdia Kelly, general secretary of the JMB, which represents the boards of management of 380 voluntary secondary schools, or two thirds of the total, said it believed that "if an educational assessment recommends the allocation of 5 hours per week of teaching resources for a pupil on the autistic spectrum, we are all complicit in short-changing that young person by accepting an allocation of 4 hours and 15 minutes per week.
“The recommended allocation of hours is vital for pupils with SEN to cope with the challenges involved in post-primary education.”
The JMB, which includes the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools, made the call for a reverse of the cuts at its annual conference in Galway.
Its survey of school mangers showed that the area most affected by the cuts was one-to-one resource teaching by specialists, although support for parents and student testing and assessment were also badly affected.
“Schools are forced to lose their focus on vulnerable and needy individual students and to begin operating solely on a collective basis in terms of service provision,” the report said.
“The individual child thus becomes ‘lost’ unless they begin to opt-out or act-out in the face of, for them, the insurmountable challenges of daily school life. The consequences for the majority of other students in the classroom, as well as staff and ultimately parents, are obvious. Students in difficulties have limited life experience, vocabulary, maturity, emotional or cognitive capacity to cope with the social and academic demands of school which challenge even the most able.”
This was causing "immediate and long term damage to the life chances of all students, not just those with identified special need," it added.
Managers interviewed for the survey reported a dramatic increase in student intake “marked increase in diagnoses of both high and low incidence disabilities”.
They identified a number of coping strategies, including allocating resource teaching to a non-specialist, drawing the deputy principal into SEN work, and privately paying for additional resource teaching services.
The report noted that the administrative burden of SEN provision has “increased exponentially” with strict assessment criteria for students. Principals and deputies are having to take on additional duties, while the “hard-won professionalisation of SEN provision at school level is breaking down”.
