Richard Boyd Barrett: Stop the SNA cliff-edge for schools
Richard Boyd Barrett addresses the Minister on equal access to education and raises urgent concerns about the allocation of special needs assistants (SNAs). He highlights a cliff-edge rule affecting IPAS students that left Holy Family National School temporarily without a half-time SNA and urges a needs-based response.
Equal access and rights
Richard Boyd Barrett grounds his remarks in the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and argues that equal access to education is a right for every child regardless of disability or additional needs. He criticises the recent reduction of special needs assistance and the government response that followed widespread school protests.
IPAS allocation and the cliff-edge problem
Using Holy Family National School in Monkstown Farm as a concrete example, he explains how the IPAS allocation system awards one half-time SNA for every 15 IPAS students, but withdraws it if numbers dip below that threshold. He calls this cliff-edge approach unfair, disruptive and damaging for all pupils and staff.
Listening to school communities
Boyd Barrett stresses the need to listen to parents, teachers and SNAs on the front line: their lived experience should determine supports. He rejects a penny-pinching or box-ticketing model and says trust in schools must replace gatekeeping that presumes false claims for resources.
Therapies, psychology and the arts in schools
He also urges the expansion of the successful pilot providing OTs, speech and language therapists and psychologists in schools, and proposes psychology departments in post-primary schools. He endorses creating paid roles for artists in every school to support inclusion and learning across the system.
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Good work and well done to you all. I'm not a member of the committee, but it is an important issue that I have very particular reasons I want to raise a specific issue with the Minister in relation to equal access to education and special needs. The starting point of the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and the fact that equal access to education is a right for children regardless of disability, additional needs and was brought into very sharp focus obviously recently with the government's move to reduce special needs assistance in many schools and the explosion that caused from school communities and the government have responded to that explosion of anger by school communities, but it highlights something that I think is terribly important, which is the need to listen to those that are impacted by our decisions and by whether the systems we have and the resources we allocate are adequate to actually ensure the equality that we profess to try and achieve in terms of delivering equal access to education and what we learned obviously from school communities and from parents and teachers and SNAs during the recent events is that the role of the SNA had massively evolved from when that circular, for example, 2014 circular was originally done up and that a sort of minimalist approach to the special needs resources that were needed for children was not adequate and there had to be a recognition of how that evolution of the role of the SNAs in providing social support and communication support and emotional support to children and that a minimalist approach which led people to think well we can reduce the SNA support on spurious grounds failed really to take on board the actual needs of children and the views and opinions of the SNAs and the parents and the school communities so listening to those directly affected, nothing about us without us approach is terribly important in this regard and it's in that context that I just want to highlight to the Minister, I don't know if he got an email, the situation which may be impacting more broadly than the particular example that I've come across is of the allocation of SNAs for children from IPAS which is a different system and in the context of the recent protests and so on, the government promised that there would be no reductions in SNA supports for schools in September but that has not come to pass in the case of the provision of SNAs for children from IPAS who are in the same schools or in the same schools as other children but it's a different system for allocating special needs something I wasn't aware of but this is where you learn from people on the front line and in this case from the Holy Family National School in Monkstown, in Monkstown Farm, in my area where the way SNAs are allocated is that for every 15 IPAS students they have in the school you get a half time SNA half a post for 16 hours but if the number of IPAS students drops below that number you lose it and that's what's happened to the Holy Family National School even if it only drops temporarily and in the case of the Holy Family the school informed me and that they have informed the department that the number has briefly dropped below the threshold of 15 but it's going to go back up again in September above but in the meantime they've had the half SNA post withdrawn and that the school simply can't cope with the impact of that and it does seem crazy to have a sort of cliff edge of that sort so if you've 15 students you get a half SNA post but if you're 14 you get none so you just go over a cliff and then the school has to pick up the slack and that's going to impact on everything else on everything else in the school so an injury to one is literally an injury to all and that's not fair and so I ask on behalf of the Holy Family National School and the children involved all of the children the IPAS children and all of the children and the teachers who will be impacted as a result of that for that to be addressed and for the schools pleas to be heard but it does speak more generally to something I think it was Simon Lewis said to me more generally about the approach we have to have in ensuring inclusivity including and giving the necessary supports and resources to avoid a sort of penny pinching model or a box ticketing model that can end up not really doing justice to the actual human lived reality of children with disability or special needs and the way he put it in literally one sentence was to say we've got to trust schools just trust schools and I think that's what's referred to there's so much buzzwords in all of these things but I think that's what's referred to when we talk about rights based and needs based that it's the actual needs that have to determine things rather than taking boxes or resource rationing which is so often the case and that I think was at the back of the recent debacle that happened in terms of the withdrawal of special needs supports for so many schools causing panic and alarm in school communities across the place across the country of recognizing from those on the front line the parents, the teachers, the SNAs, the children themselves, the school communities, they can tell you what the needs are, they're the experts, they should be believed, they shouldn't be distrusted, they shouldn't be taught that they're trying to rip the department off of resources, their word should be accepted. That's not to say that very very very occasionally people mightn't be looking for things they don't need but by and large people don't look for things they don't need and there shouldn't be an attitude at department level that people are looking for things that they don't deserve and it's when that attitude of gatekeeping does come in that we get problems. Just in my last minute I have a couple of things. The pilot project on providing therapies in schools, when is it going to be expanded to all schools? From what I hear it's a storming success and how could it not be? Providing OTs and speech and language therapists and psychologists in schools, how could that not be a good thing? We don't really need to pilot anymore, it's working, let's just do it and roll it out and have a plan to get all these speech and language and psychologists and very good, excellent. Can we also then have psychology departments in post-primary schools? That would be the next thing, something that happens in many other schools. We know mental health issues are huge and obviously in terms of special needs, neurodivergence and so on but just generally for young people there should be, there are in many other countries, psychology departments in every single school. That should be an aspiration that we have in every school. I also agree with Deputy Toole's point about arts and indeed there are many, when we're talking about expanding the basic income for arts scheme, we should develop a scheme to offer jobs to artists in every single school. In every single school where you get a decent, livable income where you can have time to practice your own art but also help bring art to children with special needs, with disabilities and so on and indeed to children generally in schools is something that I think would be well worth investing in every single school and being imperative to reach across the education system.
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