INTO conference: More than 350 new special needs teachers for primary schools are to be recruited in time for the next school year, the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, announced at the INTO conference in Tralee yesterday.
The new teachers will help to ease the crisis in the provision of education services to the 12-13 per cent of the 450,000 children in primary schools requiring special needs support.
The new teachers will work with the estimated 10 per cent of children with mild learning difficulties.
The intention is that those with more severe difficulties such as autism will receive their own personalised support programmes.
Mr Dempsey said the new resources would have a profound impact on special needs provision. Parents, he said, would no longer have to wait until a psychologist had assessed their child. Their school would have the teaching resources it needed.
Mr Dempsey's announcement came as political controversy continued to build about the 7,000 schoolchildren who have received a psychological assessment but are still waiting for support. The allocation of the new teachers means that this backlog would be cleared in time for the new school year, according to Mr Dempsey.
The recruitment of the extra teachers is a triumph for the INTO, which put special needs at the top of its agenda at this year's conference. The new jobs are being created despite the public service embargo, which will see the loss of 5,000 posts across the public sector.
Last night, Mr John Carr, the INTO general secretary, welcomed the announcement.
"We must insist that applications for special needs support are now processed as quickly as possible and that every child in the country has the necessary resources when their requirements become known in schools," he said. There was now no reason, he said, why the resources could not be in place by next Monday.
"The applications for support are in the Department and can now be addressed," he said.
Earlier, Mr Carr had described the waiting list for special needs education as a "national scandal".
Mr Dempsey disappointed delegates by confirming he had no plans to further reduce the pupil-teacher ratio at this time. During his address, Mr Carr said moves to reduce this ratio were the key to a successful primary education system. "I have a four-word phrase to encapsulate the current problems in the primary sector: it's class size, Minister", he declared.
But Mr Dempsey said: "I don't foresee any reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio." Instead, he was giving priority to special needs and educational disadvantage.
"Any extra posts I have will go to those areas in a focused way. You cannot prioritise every area. You have to cut your cloth according to your measure," he said.
Average class size in the Republic is more than 24, although many teachers still work in classes of 30-plus. Average class size is 19 in Denmark and 20 in Belgium.
