Disadvantaged schools are losing special needs teachers - with devastating results for children, reports Kitty Holland
Mark Corcoran (six) would twitch, his eyes glaze over and he'd even start crying when it came to the English reading part of his homework.
"He'd sit there saying, 'I can't do it. I'm not doing it. I can't'," says his mother, Elaine. "He was terrified of books, a nervous wreck and then I'd get really wound up with him. I'd be going at him, 'Come on. Read it. Read it'. I'd know he should know it. I'd have to leave and go into the kitchen to calm down. It was a row every night. Yes I was very worried about him."
Mark, a sweet-faced, quiet little boy, is in first class in St Vincent's Infant Boys' School, just off the North Strand in Dublin's north inner city. The school is designated as a disadvantaged school and has 100 pupils.
Mark is one of a number of boys in the school with a mild general learning difficulty. Following an approach by Elaine to school principal Pat Courtney in September, Mark has been getting one-to-one help with his reading.
He is taken for half an hour a day by the school's special needs teacher, Maura Tuffy, who gives him individual attention under the Reading Recovery Programme.
The lessons are structured - broken into three 10-minute segments during which the child may reread a familiar text; practise letter identification and word-making; read a new story; and write a story. Teachers are specially trained for the programme.
It is a 20-week, early-intervention plan for young pupils, designed to halt literacy problems before they set in.
The impact for Mark has been "fantastic", says Elaine. In the 12 weeks he has been on the programme his attitude to reading has been transformed. "He comes home every evening and he wants to do Mrs Tuffy's homework first. He wants to show me what he read that day and he reads on his own," she says. "He wants to read to his little brother, Ryan [ four]."
Tuffy, who is with us, agrees Mark's confidence about his reading abilities has increased dramatically. "His self-esteem has improved. Children, particularly boys," she says, "make a decision about failure at a very young age. They carry that for the rest of their lives if it's not turned around."
School principal Courtney is enormously enthusiastic about the Reading Recovery Programme, which has helped about 20 boys in St Vincent's since it was introduced there three years ago. "It works. We are turning young lives around, getting them before the sense of failure sets in which inevitably leads to early school drop-out and low achievement."
However, the school may be forced to drop the programme. Like 14 other disadvantaged schools in Dublin's north inner city, it has lost a special needs teachers this year. It had two special needs teachers last year. However, under the new general allocation system for special needs teachers introduced this year, it is entitled now to just 1.1.
The new system on special needs was launched with great fanfare this year. The Department of Education appointed 660 new special needs teachers and also changed the cumbersome system where previously a child had to be assessed by an educational psychologist to be deemed eligible for two-and-a-half hours of special needs teaching a week.
Now allocation is based on numbers in a school rather than assessed need. A school gets a special needs teacher for every 100 pupils. Though disadvantaged schools are entitled to one for every 80 pupils, and the new system is welcomed by most, children in smaller disadvantaged schools are suffering, says the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO).
So, in St Vincent's, while Tuffy was giving one-to-one teaching to a small number of pupils last year, another teacher was taking children with less acute but nonetheless serious needs, in groups of four or five for remedial help with their literacy and numeracy.
This year Courtney is struggling to maintain a service for those small groups. About 30 per cent of his pupils need extra help to make it to the average band of ability. "I am trying to juggle things, but I am afraid we may not be able to keep up the Reading Recovery Programme. It would be with huge reluctance that we might have to drop it."
The INTO says small disadvantaged schools "with the greatest needs" in Cork, Limerick, Galway and Co Clare have also lost special needs teachers this year.
THOUGH THE REDUCED quota applies for disadvantaged schools, it is still far too high for small schools, where up to 60 per cent of pupils in some cases need special needs assistance, "and the department knows this", says Brendan O'Sullivan, Into's representative for north central Dublin.
The proportion of special needs pupils in disadvantaged schools is far higher than in the general school population "for all the reasons set out in the [ LANDS - Literacy and Numeracy in Disadvantaged Schools] report", he says. The unpublished report, which was submitted to the department this year, says these schools "operate in very challenging environments". It points to stresses in the home, socio-economic factors, lack of educational materials in the homes, and also to drug problems in the immediate wider environment and lack of educational role models as negative issues challenging these children.
It found "the scale of low achievement in both literacy and numeracy" gave rise for "serious concern". It found "many pupils are leaving primary schools with very low levels of reading ability and a poor grasp of mathematical concepts. The dramatically low achievement levels reported suggest that pupils are not benefiting fully [ from education]".
As a result, it continues, "their potential to benefit from second-level education is very limited". This report was written before small disadvantaged schools lost learning-support resources.
A 10-MINUTE walk from St Vincent's is St Laurence O'Toole's girls' school on Sheriff Street, which has also lost a special needs teacher. The principal now does some special needs teaching and the school shares another with another school.
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, teacher at the school and local Labour Party councillor, says the impact is discernible already. It is "extremely frustrating" and "just wrong", he says.
He is spearheading a campaign "to get back what we had". A meeting next week in the Teacher's Club in Dublin will call on public representatives to support his call for a meeting between local teachers and the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin.
"This is not about competing with middle-class schools for resources. Well done to schools that have got additional resources. It's about getting back the supports these kids have a right to."
Labour Party spokeswoman on education Jan O'Sullivan will press Hanafin to meet the teachers and principals who "are having to deal with this on the ground". "It's totally wrong and goes against everything the department says it is about in tackling disadvantage."
The INTO's Brendan O'Sullivan says a special arrangement should be made for small disadvantaged schools. He suggests the threshold for special needs teachers be reduced to one per 40 pupils in such schools. "The department must acknowledge that the general allocation system as it stands just isn't working for these schools," he says.
A department spokeswoman said the National Council for Special Education (NCSE) would "establish expert groups to consider specific areas of special needs provision" and "also establish a consultative forum to facilitate inputs from the education partners and other interested parties".
Parents at St Vincent's, however, are "very worried". One mother, Julie Byrne, whose son John (seven) has Down syndrome, says he needs "every ounce of help he can get". The one-to-one help with reading he gets from Tuffy, she says, "means he has a future. If he doesn't keep getting this he will lose more and more every year. It's his right to get the most from his education that is possible, isn't it?" she asks.